Past Updates

On May 4, 1780, Massachusetts's legislative body the General Court of Massachusetts approved the Academy's charter by passing an Act incorporating the Academy...

William Henry Pickering, a Member of the Academy and an instructor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, photographed a total eclipse of the sun...

On September 19, 1919, the Academy hosted a conference of ten scholarly associations that resulted in the establishment of the American Council of Learned Societies. The purpose of the conference was to decide how American organizations could most effectively participate...

Howard Mumford Jones was president of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences from 1944 to 1951. He was instrumental in transforming the Academy into a national organization dedicated to the interdisciplinary analysis of broad-scale intellectual issues.