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The Harvard University Archives are maintained by the Harvard University Library system and are a great resource to access Harvard's historical records.
Harvard is perhaps best-known because of its enduring history of innovation in education. But even die-hard Harvard buffs are not likely to know all of these Harvard firsts and historical snippets.
YearDescription
1607John Harvard, the College's future namesake and first benefactor, was baptized at St. Saviour's Church (now Southwark Cathedral), London.
1635John Harvard received his M.A. from Cambridge University, England.
1636First College in American colonies founded. The 'Great and General Court of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England' approves £400 for the establishment of 'a schoale or colledge' later to be called 'Harvard.'
1637The Great and General Court orders the 'colledge' established one year earlier to be located at Newetowne (renamed 'Cambrige' in 1638).
Late 1637 or early 1638The Overseers purchased the College's first piece of real estate: a house and an acre of land from Goodman Peyntree. Located on the southern edge of 'Cow-yard Row' and soon distinguished as the 'College Yard,' this tract became the nucleus of present-day Harvard Yard and remains at the southern end of the Old Yard (the area west of Thayer, University, and Weld halls).
1638John Harvard wills his library (400 books) and half his estate to the College.
1639In recognition of John Harvard's bequest, the Great and General Court orders 'that the colledge agreed upon formerly to bee built at Cambridg shalbee called Harvard Colledge.'
1640Reverend Henry Dunster is appointed first president of Harvard.
1642First Harvard Commencement with nine graduates.
1649The Town of Cambridge and President Henry Dunster give Harvard the 'College Farm' at Billerica, Mass., which paid annual rent to the College until the farm was sold in 1775.
1650Harvard granted Charter, still in effect today (with 2010 amendments).
1653John Sassamon, a Massachuset Indian, became the first known Native American to study at Harvard (probably for a term or so). A disciple of Indian Bible translator John Eliot, Sassamon later became a scribe and interpreter to Wampanoag Chief Metacom (a.k.a. Metacomet, Pometacom, King Philip). In 1675, Sassamon was murdered as an English informant, touching off King Philip's War, New England's most devastating conflict between Natives and newcomers.
1692Increase Mather awarded Harvard's first Doctor of Divinity degree.
1755John Adams, future U.S.president, graduates.
1764Original Harvard Hall burns, destroying some 5,000 volumes and all but one of John Harvard's books.
1775Continental soldiers are quartered in Harvard buildings.
1776Eight Harvard alumni sign the Declaration of Independence.
1780The Massachusetts Constitution went into effect and officially recognized Harvard as a university. The first medical instruction given to Harvard students in 1781 and the founding of the Medical School in 1782 made it a university in fact as well as name.
1781Oldest continuous chapter of Phi Beta Kappa formed at Harvard.
1782 Twenty-nine-year-old John Warren was appointed Professor of Anatomy and Surgery at the Medical School. During the previous year while head of the army hospital in Boston, he had given Harvard students their first formal medical instruction. Benjamin Waterhouse was named to a second Medical School professorship, in the 'Theory and Practice of Physic.'
1783With high ceremony, Harvard Medical School officially opened as the 'Medical Institution of Harvard University.' Its first home was the ever-versatile Holden Chapel.
1787John Quincy Adams, future U.S. president, graduates.
1791A writer in the Boston press accused Harvard of poisoning students' minds with Edward Gibbon's monumental History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88). President Joseph Willard replied that far from even considering Gibbon, the College used a text by French historian Abbé Millot. Nathaniel Ames, who left Harvard around 1812, recalled Millot's as 'the most utterly worthless and contemptible work of that kind or any other extant.'
1810John Thornton Kirkland begins 18-year presidency.
1815University Hall is completed.
1816The Divinity School is established.
1817Harvard Law School is established (first reference to law school is Dane hall, 1832 in Harvard.edu list).
1829Josiah Quincy begins his 16-year presidency.
1832Dane Hall, the Law School's first new building, was formally dedicated in Harvard Yard and served for more than half a century thereafter.
1836Harvard Bicentennial.
1836Henry Wadsworth Longfellow appointed professor.
1837Ralph Waldo Emerson '21 delivers Phi Beta Kappa oration.
1839Harvard Observatory is founded.
1845Rutherford B. Hayes, future U.S. president, graduates from the Law School.
1846John Collins Warren, Medical School professor, conducts first public demonstration of ether as surgical anesthetic.
1848Louis Agassiz appointed professor of zoology and geography.
1849Dr. George Parkman disappeared at the Medical School in one of the most famous murder cases in Harvard history. Earlier, Parkman had lent money to colleague Dr. John White Webster. To secure the loan, Webster gave Parkman a mortgage on his personal property, including a valuable collection of minerals. When Parkman learned that Webster had backed another loan with the same collection, he began relentlessly pursuing Webster to collect the debt. A week after the disappearance, a suspicious janitor broke through a brick vault below Webster's lab and found human body parts, which the authorities soon discovered all around the lab. Found guilty of first-degree murder, Webster belatedly confessed and appealed for clemency, but was hanged on Aug. 30, 1850. Parkman's widow led a fund drive to support Webster's wife and children.
1852Harvard wins first intercollegiate sports event, a boat race against Yale on Lake Winnipesaukee.
1854Henry David Thoreau '37 publishes Walden. 
1855Holworthy Hall gets first gas lights in the Yard.
1862The Overseers confirmed the Rev. Thomas Hill, Class of 1843, as Harvard's 20th President. His brief tenure brought higher admissions standards, a series of public 'University Lectures' (est. 1863) by distinguished Harvard and non-Harvard scholars that paved the way for the 'Graduate School of Arts and Sciences' and University Extension, and progress toward a system of elective courses. Hill also conducted nationwide searches for new faculty appointees.
1865Election of Overseers placed in the hands of alumni, severing legal ties with the Commonwealth.
1867The Harvard Dental School made its first appointments: Daniel Harwood, professor of dental pathology and therapeutics; and Nathan Cooley Keep, professor of mechanical dentistry.
1869At the meetinghouse of First Church, Unitarian, Charles William Eliot was formally installed as Harvard's 21st President. From the outset, Eliot's 105-minute address delineated his broad educational purposes: 'The endless controversies whether language, philosophy, mathematics, or science supplies the best mental training, whether general education should be chiefly literary or chiefly scientific, have no practical lesson for us to-day. This University recognizes no real antagonism between literature and science, and consents to no such narrow alternatives as mathematics or classics, science or metaphysics. We would have them all, and at their best.'
1870The Rev. Phillips Brooks laid the cornerstone of Memorial Hall.
1872Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is founded. 
1872Arnold Arboretum is established.
1873Charles Sprague Sargent officially began a 54-year term as first director of the Arnold Arboretum (est. 1872). Sargent soon enlisted the aid of pioneering landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted – then busy designing the Boston park system – to help him lay out the grounds. 'Olmsted immediately grasped the idea that an arboretum where the public could see varied plantations of rare and exotic trees and shrubs skilfully [sic] selected, artistically arranged, and grown under scientific oversight, would not only be an appropriate feature in the park system [now known as Boston's 'Emerald Necklace'] but might well become its culminating attraction,' Benjamin Lincoln Robinson, the Asa Gray Professor of Systematic Botany, wrote in the late 1920s. Nonetheless, the Arboretum proved a hard sell, Robinson noted. 'Neither the City [of Boston] nor the Harvard Corporation welcomed the idea. The press was indifferent, and the public apathetic. Nine years of persistent effort were required before it was possible to draft a plan of procedure acceptable both to the City and to the University and to secure its approval by the General Court of Massachusetts.'
1874Department of Fine Arts is established.
1875New Haven, Conn., hosted the first Harvard-Yale football game, which Harvard won, to the delight of some 150 student boosters from Cambridge.
1879The Harvard Annex, later known as Radcliffe College, opens with 27 female students.
1880Theodore Roosevelt makes Phi Beta Kappa.
1886250th anniversary celebrated with more than 2,500 alumni and friends with President Grover Cleveland in attendance.
1890Land given by Major Henry Lee Higginson '55 dedicated as Soldiers Field, honoring alumni who died in the Civil War.
1894Radcliffe College is incorporated.
1896Fogg Art Museum opens.
1901First course offered in landscape architecture and city planning.
1903Franklin D. Roosevelt elected president of the Harvard Crimson
1903Country's first concrete football stadium is built.
1904FDR graduates.
1908With 59 students, the Graduate School of Business Administration formally opened as a Graduate Department of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Through this initial connection to established departments, President Eliot and Dean Edwin Francis Gay hoped to get the newcomer off to a well-supported start. Other U.S. universities began offering business training as early as 1886, but the course of study was overwhelmingly undergraduate. In seeking to establish business as a profession, Harvard Business School became the country's first business program limited to college graduates. By the end of the first academic year, the School had 80 students (regular and special) from 14 colleges and 12 states.
1909Abbott Lawrence Lowell begins his 24-year presidency.
1910President Lowell establishes Commission on Extension Courses, now the Harvard Extension School.
1910Theodore Roosevelt, Class of 1880, served as the 34th president of the Harvard Alumni Association (est. 1840).
1913School of Public Health is established.
1913Harvard University Press is established.
1914Professor Theodore William Richards wins Nobel Prize in Chemistry for determination of atomic weights; he is the first of 28 Harvard Nobel laureates.
1914Henry Cabot Lodge, Class of 1871, served as the 38th president of the Harvard Alumni Association (est. 1840).
1915Widener Library opens.
1920The College Library contained about 1,127,500 volumes.
1920The Business School issued Marketing Problems, its first case book, developed by Marketing Professor Melvin Thomas Copeland.
1920Graduate School of Education is established.
1924The Harvard-Boston (Egyptian) Expedition began excavation of the royal cemetery of King Cheops (Khufu) near the Great Pyramid and soon identified the tombs of Prince Kawa'ab (Cheops's eldest son), four other princes, Princess Meresankh II, and two pyramid priests.
1926Samuel Eliot Morison is appointed official historian for Tercentenary.
1928First 'iron lung' is devised by two doctors at the School of Public Health.
1930The House Plan is established with the opening of Dunster House and Lowell House.
1933James Bryant Conant begins his 20-year presidency.
1936Harvard's Tercentenary Celebration with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in attendance.
1936Graduate School of Design is established.
1936Graduate School of Public Administration is established.
1939Walter Gropius, founder of Bauhaus, becomes head of architecture at Graduate School of Design.
1940John F. Kennedy graduates.
1943Two hundred Army Quartermaster officers arrived at the Business School for a three-month intensive course in business methods. They formed a new unit of lieutenants and captains known as the Army Supply Officers' Training School, a counterpart to the Navy Supply Corps School.
1943The Harvard Alumni Bulletin tally of Harvard men in active military service equaled 'the mythical 10,000 men of Harvard.' Seventy-eight Harvard men had been killed in the line of duty, 20 were missing in action, and another 20 were prisoners of war.
1944IBM Mark I computer begins operation at Harvard.
1945Publication of President Conant's General Education in a Free Society; its recommendation will have wide influence.
1945At the Kaiser Shipyard in Richmond, Calif., the 10,800-ton SS Harvard Victory was launched as the first of a new series of U.S. Maritime Commission ships named after U.S. educational institutions. The Harvard Corporation later voted to give the ship a library of about 140 volumes selected by the American Merchant Marine Library Association. A simple plaque acknowledged the University's gift.
1947General George C. Marshall receives honorary degree: announces 'Marshall Plan' at commencement.
1953Nathan M. Pusey begins his 18-year presidency.
1955Helen Keller is the first woman to receive Harvard honorary degree.
1956Pusey announces major fund drive, the Program for Harvard College.
1956Memorial Hall tower burns down.
1959Fidel Castro is guest of Law School Forum.
1960Mary I. Bunting establishes Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study.
1960Loeb Drama Center opens.
1963Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, designed by Le Corbusier, opens.
1968Kennedy School of Government begins its Public Policy Program.
1969Harvard Community Health plan begins serving patients.
1969Student strike and takeover of University Hall.
1970Helen H. Gilbert elected first woman member of the Board of Overseers.
1971Derek C. Bok begins his 20-year presidency.
1974President Bok and FAS Dean Henry Rosovsky launch study teaching and curriculum in the College.
1975George W. Bush, future U.S. president, graduates from Business School.
1975Equal admissions policy for male and female undergraduates is adopted.
1978Core curriculum adopted.
1979President Bok announces the Harvard Campaign, the largest capital campaign in Harvard's history.
1980American Repertory Theater comes to Harvard.
1982Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, originally named the Semitic Museum and closed for 40 years, is reopened.
1983Democratic presidential candidates debate nuclear arms control at the Kennedy School.
1984Fogg, Busch-Reisinger, and Sackler Museums combine to become the Harvard Art Museums.
1986Harvard celebrates its 350th anniversary.
1991Barack Obama, future U.S. president, graduates from the Law School.
1991Neil Rudenstine is appointed president of Harvard.
1992Harvard Kennedy School Forum hosts Mikhail Gorbachev.
1994Harvard Business Publishing is founded.
1995New cholera vaccine developed at Harvard Medical School.
1997Mary Fasano became the oldest person ever to earn a Harvard degree when she graduated from the Extension School at the age of 89.
1998Nelson Mandela awarded honorary degree at special convocation.
1999Radcliffe College merges with Harvard College.
2001Lawrence Summers is appointed president.
2001On the eve of the 350th Commencement, Harvard's four living Presidents—past, present, and future—gather for a group portrait in Loeb House.
2002Former Astronomy Prof. Riccardo Giacconi shares half the Nobel Prize in Physics for pioneering work in astrophysics that led to the discovery of cosmic X-ray sources.
2004Harvard Financial Aid Initiative is launched.
2007School of Engineering and Applied Sciences is established.
2007Drew Gilpin Faust begins duties as Harvard's 28th President. She is the first woman to hold the position.
2009Unified University-wide calendar is launched.
2010The Harvard Corporation expands from 7 to 13 members.
2010Harvard University will welcome ROTC back to campus now that Congress has repealed a ban on gays and lesbians serving openly in the military.
2011Harvard University awards degree to Native American student who died in 1665 just before Commencement.
2011Harvard celebrates its 375th anniversary.
2012MIT and Harvard announce EdX.
2012Harvard announces plans to renew the University's 12 undergraduate houses.
2012Harvard releases first University-wide Sustainability Impact Report.
2013President Drew Faust launches The Harvard Campaign, the largest ever in higher education.
2013Financial aid increases by $10M, bringing the total to a record $182 million.
2014Kenneth Griffin '89 makes $150 million gift to Harvard College, principally focused on supporting Harvard's financial aid program.
2014A $350 million gift comes from The Morningside Foundation, established by the family of the late T.H. Chan. The gift renames the Harvard School of Public Health to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
2015John A. Paulson, M.B.A. '80 made the largest gift in the University's history, a $400 million endowment to support the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). The School is renamed the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
2018Lawrence S. Bacow is appointed president of Harvard.
Who We AreHarvard students debunk (and confirm) assumptions that are made about Harvard. Watch the entire video for the truth behind harvard admissions, going to harva. HLS strongly promotes public service. The school guarantees funding for summer public interest work, and over 480 JD students received funds to work throughout the U.S. And in 44 foreign countries in 2014. The Office of Public Interest Advising provides comprehensive services to students pursuing public service careers.
We are Harvard—extended to the world for every type of adult learner. 
We serve students seeking part-time, online courses and nonresidential programs to advance their career or pursue an academic passion. Our offerings include:
We are a fully accredited Harvard school. Our degrees and certificates are adorned with the Harvard University insignia. They carry the weight of that lineage. Our graduates walk at University commencement and become members of the Harvard Alumni Association.
As one of 12 degree-granting institutions at Harvard University, we teach to the largest and most eclectic student body. Our students come to us from every time zone, every culture and career background, every age from 18 to 89.
Our students have one thing in common: the motivation to take the next challenging step in their lives. They find that challenge here, where our academic standards are high and our resources extensive. 
Is Harvard Extension School the right fit for you? Whatever your learning goals, Harvard Extension School can help you achieve them. Learn about the value of a Harvard Extension School education
Meet the DeanDean of the Division of Continuing Education and University Extension
Learn more about Dean ColemanOur HistoryThe origin of Harvard Extension School can be traced back to 1835—when John Lowell Jr. founded the Lowell Institute. 
Harvard TrumpIn his will, Lowell Jr. funded an organization that provided Boston with free public lectures on a variety of subjects. The institute quickly gained an influential presence. Oliver Wendell Holmes, a lecturer at the institute, remarked, 'No nobler or more helpful institution exists in America than Boston's Lowell Institute.'
In 1906–07, A. Lawrence Lowell, a trustee of the Lowell Institute and Harvard professor of government, revealed a plan to offer public courses in collaboration with Harvard University. In 1909, when Lowell became president of Harvard, he made that vision a reality. 
In 1910 Lowell founded the Commission on Extension Courses—hailed by the Boston Evening Transcript as 'a new milestone' in education. He saw the commission as an experiment in 'popular education.' The goal was to serve those in the community who had the ability and desire to attend college, but had other obligations that kept them from traditional schools.
We have held steadfast to Lowell's vision for over a century. Today, more than 14,000 students join us in our classrooms and more than 800 degrees and 1,000 certificates are awarded each year.
1835John Lowell Jr. revises his will, leaving half of his estate to endow public lectures. This became the endowment for the Lowell Institute of Boston.
1839Lowell Institute inaugurated.
1900A. Lawrence Lowell becomes trustee of Lowell Institute.
1910Harvard Overseers approve a Department of University Extension on February 23.
1913In June, two graduates receive the first Harvard University Extension degrees.
1949Reginald H. Phelps directs and expands Harvard University Extension, stepping down in 1975.
University Extension courses are offered on radio.
1956First Harvard University Extension course is offered on television.
1960Harvard University Extension starts Polaris University for US Navy submarine crews.
Harvard Extension Alumni Association (HEAA) founded.
1975Michael Shinagel becomes dean of Harvard University Extension School.
1976Tuition Assistance Program begins for Harvard staff.
1977Certificate of Advanced Study offered.
1979Harvard University Extension introduces an ALM (master of liberal arts) degree.
Health Careers Program (premedical) starts.
1980First annual Lowell Lecture is given by McGeorge Bundy.
1983Harvard Students Ban TrumpHarvard University Extension establishes a coat of arms.
Grossman Library for University Extension moves to Sever Hall. 
1985University Extension becomes Harvard Extension School.
The Harvard Division of Continuing Education (including Harvard Extension School, Harvard Summer School, and Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement) is formally established.
Harvard Extension offers its first computer-based distance learning course ('teleteaching').
1989The first Harvard Extension 'teleteaching' course is offered in China. 
Harvard University Freshman1996Career and Academic Resources Center opens.
1997Harvard has 100 'distance learners' in Alaska, Hawaii, and other states. 
Distance education moves to streaming video and audio. 
1999Distance education strategic plan implemented.
2003Harvard Extension offers Alpha Sigma Lambda honors to ALB graduates.
2005First distance education courses offered as podcasts.
2007

Year	Description
1607	John Harvard, the College's future namesake and first benefactor, was baptized at St. Saviour's Church (now Southwark Cathedral), London.
1635	John Harvard received his M.A. from Cambridge University, England.
1636	First College in American colonies founded. The 'Great and General Court of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England' approves £400 for the establishment of 'a schoale or colledge' later to be called 'Harvard.'
1637	The Great and General Court orders the 'colledge' established one year earlier to be located at Newetowne (renamed 'Cambrige' in 1638).
Late 1637 or early 1638	The Overseers purchased the College's first piece of real estate: a house and an acre of land from Goodman Peyntree. Located on the southern edge of 'Cow-yard Row' and soon distinguished as the 'College Yard,' this tract became the nucleus of present-day Harvard Yard and remains at the southern end of the Old Yard (the area west of Thayer, University, and Weld halls).
1638	John Harvard wills his library (400 books) and half his estate to the College.
1639	In recognition of John Harvard's bequest, the Great and General Court orders 'that the colledge agreed upon formerly to bee built at Cambridg shalbee called Harvard Colledge.'
1640	Reverend Henry Dunster is appointed first president of Harvard.
1642	First Harvard Commencement with nine graduates.
1649	The Town of Cambridge and President Henry Dunster give Harvard the 'College Farm' at Billerica, Mass., which paid annual rent to the College until the farm was sold in 1775.
1650	Harvard granted Charter, still in effect today (with 2010 amendments).
1653	John Sassamon, a Massachuset Indian, became the first known Native American to study at Harvard (probably for a term or so). A disciple of Indian Bible translator John Eliot, Sassamon later became a scribe and interpreter to Wampanoag Chief Metacom (a.k.a. Metacomet, Pometacom, King Philip). In 1675, Sassamon was murdered as an English informant, touching off King Philip's War, New England's most devastating conflict between Natives and newcomers.
1692	Increase Mather awarded Harvard's first Doctor of Divinity degree.
1755	John Adams, future U.S.president, graduates.
1764	Original Harvard Hall burns, destroying some 5,000 volumes and all but one of John Harvard's books.
1775	Continental soldiers are quartered in Harvard buildings.
1776	Eight Harvard alumni sign the Declaration of Independence.
1780	The Massachusetts Constitution went into effect and officially recognized Harvard as a university. The first medical instruction given to Harvard students in 1781 and the founding of the Medical School in 1782 made it a university in fact as well as name.
1781	Oldest continuous chapter of Phi Beta Kappa formed at Harvard.
1782	Twenty-nine-year-old John Warren was appointed Professor of Anatomy and Surgery at the Medical School. During the previous year while head of the army hospital in Boston, he had given Harvard students their first formal medical instruction. Benjamin Waterhouse was named to a second Medical School professorship, in the 'Theory and Practice of Physic.'
1783	With high ceremony, Harvard Medical School officially opened as the 'Medical Institution of Harvard University.' Its first home was the ever-versatile Holden Chapel.
1787	John Quincy Adams, future U.S. president, graduates.
1791	A writer in the Boston press accused Harvard of poisoning students' minds with Edward Gibbon's monumental History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88). President Joseph Willard replied that far from even considering Gibbon, the College used a text by French historian Abbé Millot. Nathaniel Ames, who left Harvard around 1812, recalled Millot's as 'the most utterly worthless and contemptible work of that kind or any other extant.'
1810	John Thornton Kirkland begins 18-year presidency.
1815	University Hall is completed.
1816	The Divinity School is established.
1817	Harvard Law School is established (first reference to law school is Dane hall, 1832 in Harvard.edu list).
1829	Josiah Quincy begins his 16-year presidency.
1832	Dane Hall, the Law School's first new building, was formally dedicated in Harvard Yard and served for more than half a century thereafter.
1836	Harvard Bicentennial.
1836	Henry Wadsworth Longfellow appointed professor.
1837	Ralph Waldo Emerson '21 delivers Phi Beta Kappa oration.
1839	Harvard Observatory is founded.
1845	Rutherford B. Hayes, future U.S. president, graduates from the Law School.
1846	John Collins Warren, Medical School professor, conducts first public demonstration of ether as surgical anesthetic.
1848	Louis Agassiz appointed professor of zoology and geography.
1849	Dr. George Parkman disappeared at the Medical School in one of the most famous murder cases in Harvard history. Earlier, Parkman had lent money to colleague Dr. John White Webster. To secure the loan, Webster gave Parkman a mortgage on his personal property, including a valuable collection of minerals. When Parkman learned that Webster had backed another loan with the same collection, he began relentlessly pursuing Webster to collect the debt. A week after the disappearance, a suspicious janitor broke through a brick vault below Webster's lab and found human body parts, which the authorities soon discovered all around the lab. Found guilty of first-degree murder, Webster belatedly confessed and appealed for clemency, but was hanged on Aug. 30, 1850. Parkman's widow led a fund drive to support Webster's wife and children.
1852	Harvard wins first intercollegiate sports event, a boat race against Yale on Lake Winnipesaukee.
1854	Henry David Thoreau '37 publishes Walden.
1855	Holworthy Hall gets first gas lights in the Yard.
1862	The Overseers confirmed the Rev. Thomas Hill, Class of 1843, as Harvard's 20th President. His brief tenure brought higher admissions standards, a series of public 'University Lectures' (est. 1863) by distinguished Harvard and non-Harvard scholars that paved the way for the 'Graduate School of Arts and Sciences' and University Extension, and progress toward a system of elective courses. Hill also conducted nationwide searches for new faculty appointees.
1865	Election of Overseers placed in the hands of alumni, severing legal ties with the Commonwealth.
1867	The Harvard Dental School made its first appointments: Daniel Harwood, professor of dental pathology and therapeutics; and Nathan Cooley Keep, professor of mechanical dentistry.
1869	At the meetinghouse of First Church, Unitarian, Charles William Eliot was formally installed as Harvard's 21st President. From the outset, Eliot's 105-minute address delineated his broad educational purposes: 'The endless controversies whether language, philosophy, mathematics, or science supplies the best mental training, whether general education should be chiefly literary or chiefly scientific, have no practical lesson for us to-day. This University recognizes no real antagonism between literature and science, and consents to no such narrow alternatives as mathematics or classics, science or metaphysics. We would have them all, and at their best.'
1870	The Rev. Phillips Brooks laid the cornerstone of Memorial Hall.
1872	Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is founded.
1872	Arnold Arboretum is established.
1873	Charles Sprague Sargent officially began a 54-year term as first director of the Arnold Arboretum (est. 1872). Sargent soon enlisted the aid of pioneering landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted – then busy designing the Boston park system – to help him lay out the grounds. 'Olmsted immediately grasped the idea that an arboretum where the public could see varied plantations of rare and exotic trees and shrubs skilfully [sic] selected, artistically arranged, and grown under scientific oversight, would not only be an appropriate feature in the park system [now known as Boston's 'Emerald Necklace'] but might well become its culminating attraction,' Benjamin Lincoln Robinson, the Asa Gray Professor of Systematic Botany, wrote in the late 1920s. Nonetheless, the Arboretum proved a hard sell, Robinson noted. 'Neither the City [of Boston] nor the Harvard Corporation welcomed the idea. The press was indifferent, and the public apathetic. Nine years of persistent effort were required before it was possible to draft a plan of procedure acceptable both to the City and to the University and to secure its approval by the General Court of Massachusetts.'
1874	Department of Fine Arts is established.
1875	New Haven, Conn., hosted the first Harvard-Yale football game, which Harvard won, to the delight of some 150 student boosters from Cambridge.
1879	The Harvard Annex, later known as Radcliffe College, opens with 27 female students.
1880	Theodore Roosevelt makes Phi Beta Kappa.
1886	250th anniversary celebrated with more than 2,500 alumni and friends with President Grover Cleveland in attendance.
1890	Land given by Major Henry Lee Higginson '55 dedicated as Soldiers Field, honoring alumni who died in the Civil War.
1894	Radcliffe College is incorporated.
1896	Fogg Art Museum opens.
1901	First course offered in landscape architecture and city planning.
1903	Franklin D. Roosevelt elected president of the Harvard Crimson
1903	Country's first concrete football stadium is built.
1904	FDR graduates.
1908	With 59 students, the Graduate School of Business Administration formally opened as a Graduate Department of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Through this initial connection to established departments, President Eliot and Dean Edwin Francis Gay hoped to get the newcomer off to a well-supported start. Other U.S. universities began offering business training as early as 1886, but the course of study was overwhelmingly undergraduate. In seeking to establish business as a profession, Harvard Business School became the country's first business program limited to college graduates. By the end of the first academic year, the School had 80 students (regular and special) from 14 colleges and 12 states.
1909	Abbott Lawrence Lowell begins his 24-year presidency.
1910	President Lowell establishes Commission on Extension Courses, now the Harvard Extension School.
1910	Theodore Roosevelt, Class of 1880, served as the 34th president of the Harvard Alumni Association (est. 1840).
1913	School of Public Health is established.
1913	Harvard University Press is established.
1914	Professor Theodore William Richards wins Nobel Prize in Chemistry for determination of atomic weights; he is the first of 28 Harvard Nobel laureates.
1914	Henry Cabot Lodge, Class of 1871, served as the 38th president of the Harvard Alumni Association (est. 1840).
1915	Widener Library opens.
1920	The College Library contained about 1,127,500 volumes.
1920	The Business School issued Marketing Problems, its first case book, developed by Marketing Professor Melvin Thomas Copeland.
1920	Graduate School of Education is established.
1924	The Harvard-Boston (Egyptian) Expedition began excavation of the royal cemetery of King Cheops (Khufu) near the Great Pyramid and soon identified the tombs of Prince Kawa'ab (Cheops's eldest son), four other princes, Princess Meresankh II, and two pyramid priests.
1926	Samuel Eliot Morison is appointed official historian for Tercentenary.
1928	First 'iron lung' is devised by two doctors at the School of Public Health.
1930	The House Plan is established with the opening of Dunster House and Lowell House.
1933	James Bryant Conant begins his 20-year presidency.
1936	Harvard's Tercentenary Celebration with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in attendance.
1936	Graduate School of Design is established.
1936	Graduate School of Public Administration is established.
1939	Walter Gropius, founder of Bauhaus, becomes head of architecture at Graduate School of Design.
1940	John F. Kennedy graduates.
1943	Two hundred Army Quartermaster officers arrived at the Business School for a three-month intensive course in business methods. They formed a new unit of lieutenants and captains known as the Army Supply Officers' Training School, a counterpart to the Navy Supply Corps School.
1943	The Harvard Alumni Bulletin tally of Harvard men in active military service equaled 'the mythical 10,000 men of Harvard.' Seventy-eight Harvard men had been killed in the line of duty, 20 were missing in action, and another 20 were prisoners of war.
1944	IBM Mark I computer begins operation at Harvard.
1945	Publication of President Conant's General Education in a Free Society; its recommendation will have wide influence.
1945	At the Kaiser Shipyard in Richmond, Calif., the 10,800-ton SS Harvard Victory was launched as the first of a new series of U.S. Maritime Commission ships named after U.S. educational institutions. The Harvard Corporation later voted to give the ship a library of about 140 volumes selected by the American Merchant Marine Library Association. A simple plaque acknowledged the University's gift.
1947	General George C. Marshall receives honorary degree: announces 'Marshall Plan' at commencement.
1953	Nathan M. Pusey begins his 18-year presidency.
1955	Helen Keller is the first woman to receive Harvard honorary degree.
1956	Pusey announces major fund drive, the Program for Harvard College.
1956	Memorial Hall tower burns down.
1959	Fidel Castro is guest of Law School Forum.
1960	Mary I. Bunting establishes Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study.
1960	Loeb Drama Center opens.
1963	Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, designed by Le Corbusier, opens.
1968	Kennedy School of Government begins its Public Policy Program.
1969	Harvard Community Health plan begins serving patients.
1969	Student strike and takeover of University Hall.
1970	Helen H. Gilbert elected first woman member of the Board of Overseers.
1971	Derek C. Bok begins his 20-year presidency.
1974	President Bok and FAS Dean Henry Rosovsky launch study teaching and curriculum in the College.
1975	George W. Bush, future U.S. president, graduates from Business School.
1975	Equal admissions policy for male and female undergraduates is adopted.
1978	Core curriculum adopted.
1979	President Bok announces the Harvard Campaign, the largest capital campaign in Harvard's history.
1980	American Repertory Theater comes to Harvard.
1982	Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, originally named the Semitic Museum and closed for 40 years, is reopened.
1983	Democratic presidential candidates debate nuclear arms control at the Kennedy School.
1984	Fogg, Busch-Reisinger, and Sackler Museums combine to become the Harvard Art Museums.
1986	Harvard celebrates its 350th anniversary.
1991	Barack Obama, future U.S. president, graduates from the Law School.
1991	Neil Rudenstine is appointed president of Harvard.
1992	Harvard Kennedy School Forum hosts Mikhail Gorbachev.
1994	Harvard Business Publishing is founded.
1995	New cholera vaccine developed at Harvard Medical School.
1997	Mary Fasano became the oldest person ever to earn a Harvard degree when she graduated from the Extension School at the age of 89.
1998	Nelson Mandela awarded honorary degree at special convocation.
1999	Radcliffe College merges with Harvard College.
2001	Lawrence Summers is appointed president.
2001	On the eve of the 350th Commencement, Harvard's four living Presidents—past, present, and future—gather for a group portrait in Loeb House.
2002	Former Astronomy Prof. Riccardo Giacconi shares half the Nobel Prize in Physics for pioneering work in astrophysics that led to the discovery of cosmic X-ray sources.
2004	Harvard Financial Aid Initiative is launched.
2007	School of Engineering and Applied Sciences is established.
2007	Drew Gilpin Faust begins duties as Harvard's 28th President. She is the first woman to hold the position.
2009	Unified University-wide calendar is launched.
2010	The Harvard Corporation expands from 7 to 13 members.
2010	Harvard University will welcome ROTC back to campus now that Congress has repealed a ban on gays and lesbians serving openly in the military.
2011	Harvard University awards degree to Native American student who died in 1665 just before Commencement.
2011	Harvard celebrates its 375th anniversary.
2012	MIT and Harvard announce EdX.
2012	Harvard announces plans to renew the University's 12 undergraduate houses.
2012	Harvard releases first University-wide Sustainability Impact Report.
2013	President Drew Faust launches The Harvard Campaign, the largest ever in higher education.
2013	Financial aid increases by $10M, bringing the total to a record $182 million.
2014	Kenneth Griffin '89 makes $150 million gift to Harvard College, principally focused on supporting Harvard's financial aid program.
2014	A $350 million gift comes from The Morningside Foundation, established by the family of the late T.H. Chan. The gift renames the Harvard School of Public Health to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
2015	John A. Paulson, M.B.A. '80 made the largest gift in the University's history, a $400 million endowment to support the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). The School is renamed the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
2018	Lawrence S. Bacow is appointed president of Harvard.

First collaborative-learning courses open, mixing in-class and online learners. 
2013Harvard Freshman ProfileHuntington D. Lambert becomes the dean of the Division of Continuing Education and University Extension.
2015HBX, Harvard Business School's online digital education initiative, and Harvard Extension School, partner to offer college-level credit for students taking the HBX Credential of Readiness (CORe).
2016Smithsonian Institute and Harvard Extension partner to offer Museum Studies students the opportunity to take courses with Smithsonian staff and study on-site in Washington D.C.
Our Commitment to the Future of EducationAs our world transitions fully to the knowledge economy, Harvard Extension School stands at the forefront of the greatest wave in education—that of open access and active learning.
No one knows precisely what universities of the future will look like, but we can predict with some confidence that they will emphasize what we already value: increased quality and clear satisfaction of student expectations, with some combination of online and on-campus interaction—recognizing that different students learn in different ways.
Harvard University Responds To TrumpOur end goal is the creation of new knowledge and the preservation of academic freedoms. We uphold the great liberal arts tradition, which challenges students to think deeply and critically—an asset in any pursuit. 
We're also expanding access to higher education through online courses, summer courses and hybrid courses (which blend online and on campus) to meet the diverse needs of you, our students.
In this regard, Harvard Extension School can serve as a working model for our field. What matters to us is your commitment—not only to your own growth, but to our global society.
Together, we can make future generations stronger, more informed, and ready for the challenges ahead.