Four centuries of Harvard, 1636–2036
Four hundred years from a frame house with four hundred books to the world’s most influential university — the long argument that a place is only as lasting as what it dares to teach.
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Harvard400 as living memory
Open one object and the anniversary becomes a person, a place, a route, and a thread through the city.
A slow campus crossing. Then open Harvard Yard.
The older layer. Then open Harvard University.
The older layer. Then open Harvard University.
One exhibit, then the nearest story. Then open Harvard University.
Boston’s 400th is a once-in-a-century civic moment. Present the record the city is built on.
Inquire about this placement →Upcoming anniversaries computed live from the graph · full timeline →
The road to 2030 the program of quadricentennial moments
Living History · interactiveDrag a slider across four centuries and watch the founding, the Revolution, the institutions, and the modern city appear on the map in the order history actually wrote them.
Historic figures the people who shaped the city — ranked by their reach in the graph
John Harvard
Young Puritan minister (1607–1638) whose deathbed gift of his library and half his estate gave the new college his name.
Alvan Graham Clark
Telescope maker of the Cambridgeport firm Alvan Clark & Sons who, while testing a new lens in 1862, made the first sighting of Sirius B, the white-…
Edward Bernays
Nephew of Freud and self-styled father of public relations, whose campaigns shaped modern persuasion; he spent his long final decades in Cambridge…
Victor Conrad
Austrian-born seismologist and climatologist for whom the Conrad discontinuity in the Earth's crust is named; he emigrated to the United States and…
George Phillips Bond
Second director of the Harvard College Observatory and a pioneer of astronomical photography, who with his father shared in the discovery of Saturn…
Henry Murray
Harvard psychologist who directed the Harvard Psychological Clinic and co-created the Thematic Apperception Test, a staple of twentieth-century per…
Martin Wagner
German architect and Berlin's chief city planner in the Weimar years, a force behind the era's modernist housing estates; he later taught city plan…
Mary Devens
Cambridge pictorialist photographer of the turn of the century, a member of the Photo-Secession circle gathered around Alfred Stieglitz.
The timeline — oldest first graph-ranked by year
John Harvard
Young Puritan minister (1607–1638) whose deathbed gift of his library and half his estate gave the new college his name.
Cambridge Common
Common ground since 1631 and the mustering place of the Continental Army, where by long tradition Washington took command in 1775; now the civic gr…
Harvard University
The oldest institution of higher learning in the United States, founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, John Harvard.
Harvard Yard
The oldest part of the oldest American university — 22 acres of elms, freshman dorms, Widener Library and the John Harvard statue.
Founding of Harvard College (1636)
The Great and General Court voted £400 in 1636 to establish a college at Newtowne — the first institution of higher learning in English America.
First Printing Press in British America (1638)
In 1638 Stephen Daye set up the first printing press in England’s American colonies, steps from Harvard Yard. Its Bay Psalm Book (1640) was the fir…
The Eliot Indian Bible (1663)
The first Bible printed in British America was printed in Cambridge in 1663 — in Wôpanâak, the Massachusett language, translated with Native collab…
William Brattle House
Georgian house of 1727 built for William Brattle, the Loyalist general who fled Cambridge in 1774; one of the Tory Row estates that gave Brattle St…
Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters
The 1759 Brattle Street mansion that served as Washington’s headquarters during the Siege of Boston (1775–76) and later as Longfellow’s home for 45…
From Cambridge's past to what comes next.
History Is For Everyone opens the people and events that shaped Cambridge. This guide follows the living place: its institutions, streets, ideas, and next chapter.
Why it mattersFour hundred years from a frame house with four hundred books to the world’s most influential university — the long argument that a place is only as lasting as what it dares to teach.
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