//
Photo: via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
Drawing from the University's vast natural history collections, the HMNH displays the famous Blaschka 'Glass Flowers' collection, dinosaurs (the world's only mounted long Kronosaurus), minerals, meteorites, gemstones (a amethyst geode), and hundreds of 'stuffed' animals and birds. Fun for the whole family. It's an 8-minute walk across the historic Harvard Yard from Harvard Square (Red Line MBTA). Lectures & educational programs for all ages.
The Harvard Museum of Natural History (HMNH) is a natural history museum housed in the University Museum Building, located on the campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It features 16 galleries with 12,000 specimens drawn from the collections of the university's three natural history research museums: the Harvard University Herbaria, the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and the Harvard Mineralogical Museum.
© OpenStreetMap contributors
One of the oldest museums in the world devoted to anthropology, it houses one of the most comprehensive records of human cultural history in the Western Hemisphere.
formerly Semitic Museum
See a collection of over 40,000 artifacts from the Near East across multiple ancient civilizations.
The Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments
Representing a broad range of scientific studies, this museum holds over 20,000 unique instruments dating from 1400 to present day.
The center and oldest part of the Harvard campus. An enclosed grassy yard including picturesque buildings dating as far back as 1720. While somewhat architecturally uninspiring, the freshman undergraduate dorms are located in Harvard Yard, which means that a long list of famous intellectual and political figures have lived here. Near the center is a statue of John Harvard, for whom the university is named. Tour guides will tell you that students rub the statue's left foot for good luck before exams, and the foot is indeed rubbed shiny. But in reality, most of the rubbing is probably done by tourists rather than students. It is also school tradition of some secret societies at Harvard to pee on the boot of the foot, but this may also be a lie.
This collection of museums includes three once separate entities. The Fogg Museum, known for western art from the Middle Ages to the present, with particular strengths in Italian early Renaissance, British pre-Raphaelite, and 19th-century French art. The Busch-Reisinger Museum, which is devoted to promoting the informed enjoyment and critical understanding of the arts of Central and Northern Europe, with a special emphasis on the German-speaking countries. Finally, the Arthur M. Sackler Museum holds a superb collection of ancient, Islamic, Asian, and later Indian art.
On July 3, 1775, George Washington officially took command of the Continental Army at ceremonies taking place beneath this Elm tree, which stood at the edge of the training grounds used by the troops. While this tale may be a myth, clearly the tree has remained a symbol of patriotism in Cambridge for generations. The tree finally succumbed to old age and disease in 1923, and today a small bronze plaque marks this historical spot.