Overview
For over 220 years, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences has
been honoring excellence and providing service to the nation and the world.
Through independent, nonpartisan study, its ranks of distinguished
"scholar-patriots" have brought the arts and sciences into constructive
interplay with the leaders of both the public and private sectors.
The Academy was founded during the American Revolution by John
Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock, and other leaders who contributed
prominently to the establishment of the new nation, its government, and its
Constitution. Its purpose was to provide a forum for a select group of
scholars, members of the learned professions, and government and business
leaders to work together on behalf of the democratic interests of the republic.
In the words of the Academy's charter, enacted in
1780, the "end and design of the institution is...to cultivate every art and
science which may tend to advance the interest, honour, dignity, and happiness
of a free, independent, and virtuous people."
Today the Academy is an international learned society with a dual
function: to elect to membership men and women of exceptional achievement,
drawn from science, scholarship, business, public affairs, and the arts, and to
conduct a varied program of projects and studies responsive to the needs and
problems of society.
The Academy's unique strength lies in the distinguished leadership
of its 4,000 Fellows and 600 Foreign Honorary Members
and the wide range of expertise they bring to its multidisciplinary analyses of
compelling contemporary issues. The Academy is probably best known to the
public through its quarterly journal, Dædalus,
widely regarded as one of the world's leading intellectual journals.
Recent Academy projects have focused
on the changing nature and needs of higher education and research, the
well-being of the humanities in the United States and their central role in
assuring the vitality of our cultural life, the emerging challenges of
scientific and technological advances, geoglobal politics, population and the
environment, and the welfare of children.
Now in its third century, the Academy continues to mobilize the
intellectual resources needed to anticipate, examine, and confront the critical
challenges facing our society.
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