Harvard University United state of America (USA) best university

Harvard University, oldest institution of higher learning in the United States (founded 1636) and one of the nation’s most prestigious. It is one of the Ivy League schools. The main university campus lies along the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a few miles west of downtown Boston. Harvard’s total enrollment is about 23,000.

Harvard’s history began when a college was established at New Towne, which was later renamed Cambridge for the English alma mater of some of the leading colonists. Classes began in the summer of 1638 with one master in a single frame house and a “college yard.” Harvard was named for a Puritan minister, John Harvard, who left the college his books and half of his estate.

At its inception Harvard was under church sponsorship, although it was not formally affiliated with any religious body. During its first two centuries the college was gradually liberated, first from clerical and later from political control, until in 1865 the university alumni began electing members of the governing board. During his long tenure as Harvard’s president (1869–1909), Charles W. Eliot made Harvard into The alumni and faculty of Harvard have been closely associated with many areas of American intellectual and political development. By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, Harvard had educated seven U.S. presidents—John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Barack Obama—and a number of justices, cabinet officers, and congressional leaders. Literary figures among Harvard graduates include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry David Thoreau, James Russell Lowell, Henry James, Henry Adams, T.S. Eliot, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, Walter Lippmann, and Norman Mailer. Other notable intellectual figures who graduated from or taught at Harvard include the historians Francis Parkman, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Samuel Eliot Morison; the astronomer Benjamin Peirce; the chemist Wolcott Gibbs; and the naturalist Louis Agassiz. William James introduced the experimental study of psychology into the United States at Harvard in the 1870s.

Harvard’s undergraduate school, Harvard College, contains about one-third of the total student body. The core of the university’s teaching staff consists of the faculty of arts and sciences, which includes the graduate faculty of arts and sciences. The university has graduate or professional schools of medicine, law, business, divinity, education, government, dental medicine, design, and public health. The schools of law, medicine, and business are particularly prestigious. Among the advanced research institutions affiliated with Harvard are the Museum of Comparative Zoology (founded in 1859 by Agassiz), the Gray Herbarium, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, the Arnold Arboretum, and the Fogg Art Museum. Also associated with the university are an astronomical observatory in Harvard, Massachusetts; the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, D.C., a centre for Byzantine and pre-Columbian studies; and the Harvard-Yenching Institute in Cambridge for research on East and Southeast Asia. The Harvard University Library is one of the largest and most important university libraries in the world.

Important Link

Watch Amazing School Video : Click Here

Radcliffe College, one of the Seven Sisters schools, evolved from informal instruction offered to individual women or small groups of women by Harvard University faculty in the 1870s. In 1879 a faculty group called the Harvard Annex made a full course of study available to women, despite resistance to coeducation from the university’s administration. Following unsuccessful efforts to have women admitted directly to degree programs at Harvard, the Annex, which had incorporated as the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women, chartered Radcliffe College in 1894. The college was named for the colonial philanthropist Ann Radcliffe, who established the first scholarship fund at Harvard in 1643.