Founded in 1959, the series bears the name of the first major benefactor of Harvard University.
[1] During the 1960s and 1970s, the John Harvard Library consisted mainly of authoritative reprints of documents from the colonial era of American history.
Among the most noted of these are Bernard Bailyn's edition of Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750-1776; Anne Bradstreet's collected works; and the Life of George Washington by Mason L. Weems.
Editorial contributors to the series included historians John Hope Franklin and C. Vann Woodward, and poet Adrienne Rich.
With the fiftieth anniversary of the series in 2009, Harvard University Press released new paperback editions of four 19th-century works: The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; The Common Law, by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.; and Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe.