Massachusetts Bay sets aside £400 toward a school or college

Massachusetts Bay in 1636 was still a cluster of new towns around Boston harbor, and its Puritan leaders worried about where the next generation of ministers and magistrates would come from. On October 28, the Great and General Court voted £400, "toward a school or college," with no building, faculty, or name yet attached. The money sat untouched for two years before the colony chose a site in Cambridge. That appropriation became the seed of Harvard University, the first college in the English colonies…