Short answers, pulled from the story.
King George II issued a royal charter establishing King's College on the 31st of October 1754. Samuel Johnson served as the institution's first president and an Anglican priest who presided over classes beginning that July.
The legislature passed an act renaming the institution Columbia College on the 1st of May 1784 to honor the new Republic after the American Revolutionary War caused catastrophic disruption to operations. Instruction had suspended for eight years starting with the arrival of the Continental Army in 1776.
University president Seth Low moved the campus from 49th Street to Morningside Heights where it remains today in 1896. Architects McKim, Mead & White designed the campus along Beaux-Arts planning principles covering over six city blocks.
Columbia scientists achieved the first nuclear fission reaction in the Americas at Pupin Hall ten days after experiments in Copenhagen Denmark. Edwin Howard Armstrong developed FM radio technology which became Columbia's birthplace invention while Martin Chalfie introduced Green Fluorescent Protein labeling cells in intact organisms for biological research.
Three U.S. presidents attended Columbia: Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Barack Obama. The university has also produced five Founding Fathers of the United States including Alexander Hamilton who opposed Tory president Myles Cooper during revolutionary times.