History of Harvard University in North America was brought from Spain to Mexico City, with production beginning in 1539. In 1639, the college was renamed Harvard College after clergyman John Harvard, a University of Cambridge alumnus who had willed the new school £779 pounds sterling and his library of some 400 books. The colony charter creating the Harvard Corporation was granted in 1650 at the beginning of the English Interregnum. When the college's first president Henry Dunster abandoned Puritanism in favor of the English Baptist faith in 1654, he provoked a controversy that highlighted two distinct approaches to dealing with dissent in the Massachusetts
Memorial Hall (Harvard University) Handsome Dan. The 1897 tower was destroyed by fire in 1956 and rebuilt, to its 18771897 appearance, in 1996. The John Harvard statue was originally (1884) installed before Memorial Hall's west façade, but in 1924 it was moved to its current location on the west side of University Hall. Memorial Hall being still, at the time, the college dining hall, a Harvard Lampoon cartoon showed "John Harvard" dismounting his plinth, chair in tow, and holding his nose because he "couldn't stand the smell of 'Mem' any longer". Memorial Hall (Harvard University) Memorial Hall, immediately north of Harvard Yard in Cambridge,