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
Harvard University has been responsible for essentially all aspects of admission, instruction, and undergraduate life for women, and Radcliffe was formally merged into Harvard in 1999. Drew Gilpin Faust, previously the dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, became Harvard's president on July 1, 2007. In February 2018, Lawrence Seldon Bacow was designated to take office as its 29th president on July 1, 2018. Harvard's main campus is centered on Harvard Yard in Cambridge, about west-northwest of downtown Boston, and extends into the surrounding Harvard Square neighborhood. Harvard Yard itself contains the central administrative offices and main libraries of the university,