Company Profile
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Company Overview
Since its founding in 1780, the American Academy has served the nation as a champion of scholarship, civil dialogue, and useful knowledge.
As one of the nation’s oldest learned societies and independent policy research centers, the Academy convenes leaders from the academic, business, and government sectors to address critical challenges facing our global society.
Through studies, publications, and programs on the Humanities, Arts, and Culture; American Institutions, Society, and the Public Good; Science, Engineering, and Technology; Global Security and International Affairs; and American Institutions and the Public Good, the Academy provides authoritative and nonpartisan policy advice to decision-makers in government, academia, and the private sector.
The Academy’s membership of 4,900 Fellows and 600 Foreign Honorary Members includes many of the most accomplished scholars and practitioners worldwide. The Academy frequently sponsors meetings, lectures, panel discussions, and informal gatherings around the country. Topics are drawn from Academy projects and studies as well as the research and writings of Academy members.
Company History
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, established by the Massachusetts legislature on May 4, 1780, is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. When the Academy was created, the War for Independence had not ended and the Constitution was yet to be drafted. The Academy’s founders, led by John Adams and James Bowdoin, were already looking to the future, anticipating the young republic’s needs for new knowledge and practical ideas.
From its beginnings, the Academy has engaged in the critical questions of the day. It has brought together the nation’s and the world’s most distinguished citizens to address social and intellectual issues of common concern and, above all, to develop ways to translate knowledge into action. Since 1780, Academy members have included both those who discover and advance knowledge and those who apply knowledge to the problems of society. Working together, they have established a legacy of leadership that continues to produce reflective, independent, and pragmatic studies that inform public policy and lead to constructive action.
In 1780, sixty-two individuals – clergymen and merchants, scholars and physicians, farmers and public leaders – signed their names to the Charter of the American Academy. Along with John Adams and James Bowdoin, the founders included Samuel Adams, then a delegate to the Continental Congress; John Hancock, Governor of Massachusetts; and Robert Treat Paine, Attorney General of Massachusetts and, with Hancock, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Before the turn of the century, the Academy’s Fellowship broadened with the election of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton, among others.
During the nineteenth century, the elected membership included Daniel Webster, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John J. Audubon, Louis Agassiz, Asa Gray, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Alexander Graham Bell.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, membership in the Academy continued to grow as noted scholars, scientists, and statesmen were elected. These individuals included A. A. Michelson, Percival Lowell, Alexander Agassiz, Charles Steinmetz, Charles Evans Hughes, Samuel Eliot Morison, Albert Einstein, Henry Lee Higginson, Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft, and Henry Cabot Lodge.
Over the centuries, the Academy has extended honorary membership to prominent scholars, scientists, and statesmen from abroad. Notable foreign members have included Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, William Gladstone, John Singleton Copley, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Niels Bohr, Winston Churchill, Jawaharlal Nehru, Albert Schweitzer, Claude Levi-Strauss, Kazuo Ishigoro, Stephen Hawking, and Abba Eban.