American Realities with Bill Youngs
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    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
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    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
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    • American Realities (Book) >
      • History as a Story
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      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map

DUNSTER, HENRY

(1609 Bury, England-27 February 1659, Scituate, MA). Education: B.A., Magdalene College, Cambridge University, 1631, M.A., Magdalene College, 1634. Career: Schoolmaster and curate, Bury, England, 1634-40; president, Harvard College, 1640-54; minister, Scituate, MA, 1655-59.

The first president of Harvard, Henry Dunster was so effective in his work that he can be credited with making John Harvard's idea into a reality. The Puritan leaders generally agreed that New England should have a college to educate new generations of ministers. But when Dunster arrived in America four years after the "founding" of the college, it consisted of merely one building and three acres of land. There were no regular rules for admission and no set curriculum. Dunster provided these and more.

Dunster's reputation as a schoolmaster preceded him to Massachusetts, accounting for his appointment He established a curriculum following English universities, and including Greek, Latin, Hebrew, logic, metaphysics, and divinity. Most of the early graduates of Harvard were ministers, and the curriculum was designed to nourish the piety and religious knowledge of all graduates. Dunster held that the school must "lay Christ in the bottom, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning." In addition to leading Harvard as teacher and administrator, Dunster devoted his limited resources to the college, building the president's house with his own resources, and giving Harvard one hundred acres of land.

Early New England was a hotbed of religious ideas. In some cases, like the debate over the Half-Way Covenant, the leaders were open to both sides of a debate. In others, like the dispute with Anne Hutchinson*, no tolerance was allowed. Dunster discovered another boundary to Puritan tolerance when he preached one day against infant baptism, preferring the Baptist idea of believer's baptism. He was promptly dismissed from the presidency of Harvard, indicted for heresy before the grand jury, sentenced to public admonition, and required to post a bond for future good behavior. He was also persecuted for failing to baptize one of his own children. Only after considerable pleading was he allowed to stay for a few months in the house he had built. He then moved on to Scituate, in Plymouth, were he was appointed minister and lived out the remainder of his life.
The fate of Henry Dunster, who did so much to establish "fair Harvard," is a reminder of the religious intolerance that existed in the Congregational commonwealths.

Bibliography
B: AAP 1, 125-26; DAB 5, 524; DARB, 136-37; NCAB 6, 409-10; SH 4, 31; Jeremiah Chaplin, The Life of Henry Dunster (Boston, 1872); Samuel Dunster, Henry Dunster and His Descendants (Central Falls, R.I., 1876).