early USA History and Harvard

1400s

1492 - Christopher Columbus lands on one of the Bahamas Islands.
1497 - John Cabot lands in Newfoundland, begins the British presence in N.America.

1500s

1513 - Vasco Núñez de Balboa crosses isthmus of Panama, sees Pacific Ocean.
1513 - Juan Ponce de León defeats Tlaxcala, a small state near the Aztec empire.
1520s - Spanish begin conquest of Maya civilization.
1521 - Hernán Cortés destroys the Aztec empire.
1524 - Giovanni da Verrazzano, working for France, explores coastline from present-day Maine to North Carolina.
1542 - Hernando de Soto discovers the Mississippi River, strengthening Spanish claims to the interior of North America.
1565 - Admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founds St. Augustine, Florida the first Spanish settlement in the New World, and is the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the continental United States.
1570s - Iroquois Confederacy founded.
1587 - Sir Walter Raleigh founds Roanoke Colony, the first English settlement in the New World, in the Virginia Colony.
1590 - Roanoke Colony found deserted.

1600s

1603 - Queen Elizabeth I dies, is succeeded by James VI of Scotland as James I.
1607 - Jamestown Settlement is founded by English gold seekers.
1607 - Colony of Virginia founded.
1614 - Dutch claim New Netherland.
1620 - Mayflower Compact signed.
1628 - Massachusetts Bay Colony founded.
1624 - Foundation of New York City as New Amsterdam.
1630 - Winthrop Fleet travels to Massachusetts Bay Colony.
1630 - Rensselaerwyck founded.
1634 - Province of Maryland founded.
1634 - Theologian Roger Williams banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony.
1635 - Connecticut Colony founded by Thomas Hooker.
1636 - Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations founded by Roger Williams.
1636 - Harvard College founded.

John married Ann Sadler (1614-1655), of Ringmer, Sussex, in April, 1636, daughter of the Rev. John Sadler and sister of Harvard's contemporary, John Sadler, the lawyer and orientalist.

In May 1637 he emigrated with his wife to New England and settled in Charlestown, Massachusetts, where many of his classmates had arrived before him. Charlestown made him the minister of the Church, but within the following year he contracted tuberculosis and died on September 14, 1638. He is buried at the Phipps Street Cemetery in Charlestown.

Childless, Harvard bequeathed £779 (half of his estate) and his library of around 400volumes to the New College at nearby Cambridge, which had been founded on September 8, 1636, and to his friend, the first schoolmaster of this college, Nathaniel Eaton. Eaton's Records indicate that the building of the new college began immediately in 1638 with the assistance of the carpenter Thomas Meakins and/or his son, Thomas Meakins, Jr. of Charlestown. It was completely constructed of wood, with a stone foundation and cellar, had its own apple orchard, and was apparently equipped with live-in accommodations for some 30 students, as there were at least that many attendant within the first year.

The school renamed itself "Harvard College" on March 13, 1639, and Harvard was first referred to as a university rather than a college by the new Massachusetts constitution of 1780.

No records or illustrations remain of the earliest college, which burnt to the ground in 1764 along with all but one of Harvard's original 400 volume donation.