John Harvard
Young Puritan minister (1607–1638) whose deathbed gift of his library and half his estate gave the new college his name.
Enter this moment →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 first book printed in British America — a copy sold in 2013 for $14.2 million, the most ever paid for a printed book.
Enter this moment →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 collaborators including Job Nesutan and James Printer. Today it anchors the Wampanoag language reclamation movement.
Enter this moment →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 Street its name.
Enter this moment →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 years.
Enter this moment →Dexter Pratt House
The 1808 Brattle Street home of blacksmith Dexter Pratt, whose smithy under a spreading chestnut tree Longfellow fixed in verse in The Village Blacksmith.
Enter this moment →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-dwarf companion of the sky's brightest star.
Enter this moment →First Church in Cambridge
Congregational church whose gathered congregation dates to 1636; its meetinghouse of 1870 stands on Garden Street facing the Common.
Enter this moment →Harvard Stadium
The world’s first massive reinforced-concrete stadium (1903) — its fixed dimensions are why football legalized the forward pass in 1906: the field couldn’t be widened, so the game went vertical.
Enter this moment →The Mark I Computer (1944)
On August 7, 1944, IBM presented Harvard with the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator — the Mark I, the first large-scale automatic digital computer in America, 51 feet of relays and shafts. Grace Hopper wrote its manual. Part of it still stands in the Science Center lobby.
Enter this moment →Academy of Arts and Sciences Headquarters
Kallmann McKinnell & Wood — the firm behind Boston City Hall — designed this 1981 headquarters for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, set into the trees of Norton's Woods.
Enter this moment →Smith Campus Center
Harvard’s 2018 living room on the Square — free to enter, full of greenery, and the best public bathroom and meeting point in the neighborhood.
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