1636
Hong Taiji Proclaims Qing Dynasty
Nurhaci's son renamed his people Manchu, adopted the Chinese dynastic name Qing, and had himself crowned emperor in the Manchu capital of Mukden. He built a miniature version of the Ming bureaucracy and prepared, patiently, for the invasion of the great empire to the south. The dynasty he proclaimed would rule China for nearly three centuries.
Harvard College Founded
The Massachusetts General Court appropriated four hundred pounds to found a new college in Cambridge, named two years later after the young Puritan minister John Harvard, who bequeathed his library and half his estate. New England's Puritans had their university, barely six years after landing, and it would grow into the oldest institution of higher learning in North America.
Dutch Tulip Mania Peaks
In the Netherlands, speculation in rare tulip bulbs reached surreal heights: a single Semper Augustus bulb changed hands for the price of an Amsterdam canal house. Taverns became trading floors; servants gambled in futures. By February 1637 the market collapsed overnight, ruining small speculators and seeding the first modern financial bubble story.
Roger Williams Founds Providence
Banished from Massachusetts for preaching separation of church and state and for questioning the legitimacy of royal land grants, the minister Roger Williams bought land from the Narragansett and founded Providence on Rhode Island as a refuge for dissenters. It would become the first colony with genuine religious liberty, an experiment in toleration that later generations would recognize as prophetic.
Providence Plantations
Roger Williams and a handful of followers purchased land from Narragansett sachems Canonicus and Miantonomi and founded a settlement called Providence, based explicitly on liberty of conscience. The colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations would become the first polity in European North America to separate church and state, a principle that would eventually be written into the American Constitution.