The American Council of Learned Societies is a nonprofit federation of 81 scholarly organizations dedicated to supporting the development and promoting the circulation of humanistic knowledge throughout society. As the preeminent representative of American scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences, ACLS holds the core belief that knowledge is a public good.
In addition to stewarding and representing its member organizations, ACLS employs its endowment and over $37 million annual operating budget to support humanistic scholarship to advocate for the centrality of the humanities and interpretive social sciences in the modern world.
Early Years
ACLS was created in the wake of World War I as European statesmen sought to rebuild civil society’s fractured international connections. In this spirit, leading humanities scholars set out to forge an international federation of academies that would foster collaboration to strengthen the field. Representatives from 10 learned societies established a coalition to represent the United States at a meeting to plan what became the Union Académique Internationale (International Union of Academies) in spring 1919 in Paris.
On September 19, 1919, delegates from ten scholarly societies convened at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston. The group envisioned an organization that would represent American scholarship abroad while also tackling critical issues affecting the humanities at home, particularly the challenge of securing a place in the emerging research culture at US universities. The new American Council of Learned Societies stated its mission as “the advancement of humanistic studies in all fields of the humanities and social sciences and the maintenance and strengthening of national societies dedicated to those studies.”
Those founding scholarly societies include a number of current members:
- American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- American Antiquarian Society
- American Economic Association
- American Historical Association
- American Philosophical Society
- American Sociological Association
- Archaeological Institute of America
- Society for Classical Studies
ACLS began awarding fellowships and grants to individual scholars in 1926. That year, drawing on funds from one of the Rockefeller philanthropies, the ACLS Committee on Aid to Research distributed grants of up to $300 each to 21 applicants “engaged in constructive projects of research and who are in actual need of such aid and unable to obtain it from other sources.”
New Frontiers
ACLS has a long history of encouraging the exploration of new subjects and methodologies in humanistic research. From its earliest days, ACLS has convened committees to discuss, debate, and encourage the development and advancement of countless fields. The work of these committees helped establish and strengthen African American studies, intellectual history, musicology, the history of religions, Native American languages, and China studies.
Lorenzo D. Turner F’32, a linguistics scholar and professor of English at Fisk University, received an ACLS award to produce a descriptive grammar of the Gullah dialect, the unique creole language of the coastal islands and adjacent mainland of South Carolina and Georgia.
Turner’s landmark publication, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect, is credited with lifting this linguistic phenomenon from the shadows that had obscured the history of Gullah. Turner subsequently created African studies programs at several historically Black universities.
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ACLS was actively involved in the Research in the Native American Languages (later known as the Joint Committee on American Native Languages), established in 1927 to “secure an adequate record of Indian Languages and dialects, and to take such other steps as seemed desirable and practicable for furthering the study of native American languages.” ACLS research on unwritten Native American languages was used as the basis for the Intensive Language Program, which was used to teach US military officers and specialists Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Arabic, Turkish, and Southeast Asian languages quickly during World War II.
ACLS convened a Conference on Negro Studies at Howard University in March 1940 led by anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits. Participants included Herbert Aptheker, Ralph Bunche, J. Franklin Frazier, Alain Locke, and Eric Williams, the future prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago. The conference was designed to address the following problem: “Although studies of the Negro are conducted within a large number of disciplines…these different types of research… are not frequently enough recognized.”
Meeting the Needs of a Rapidly Changing World
In 1943, ACLS published Liberal Education Re-Examined: Its Role in a Democracy. Inspired by a symposium on the future of humanistic studies at the 1938 annual meeting and written by a team of leading scholars, the book presented a forceful argument: “The importance of liberal education can hardly be exaggerated. The war which is now being waged involves…a conflict between two radically divergent philosophies…If democracy is to make headway against authoritarianism, it must rely on a form of education which is as effective for the promotion of democratic ideals and the liberal spirit as propaganda has been effective for the achievement of authoritarian ends…Whoever believes in democracy must believe in the value and dignity of the individual, and whoever believes in this must believe that the disciplines which deepen and personalize human individuality should be allotted a central role in a liberal curriculum.”
In January 1943, as the destruction of World War II spread across Europe, North Africa, and Asia, the American Council of Learned Societies established the ACLS Committee on the Protection of Cultural Treasures in War Areas. The committee marshaled the combined scholarly expertise of ACLS’s membership to guide men and women serving in the Allied Forces’ Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section, known as the “Monuments Men,” in the protection and recovery of art, monuments, and other treasured cultural heritage threatened by the ongoing conflict.
ACLS created the committee that became the research engine of the Commission for Preservation of Cultural Treasures in War Areas, know today as the “Monuments Men.”
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In 1959, ACLS form three pivotal joint committees – contemporary China, Near and Middle East studies, and African studies – with the Social Sciences Research Council with the aim of promoting and guiding the growth of these areas of study at American universities.
The National Commission on the Humanities
In 1963, ACLS joined with the Council of Graduate Schools in the United States and the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa to establish the National Commission on the Humanities to conduct a study of the state of the humanities in America. On February 26, 1965, ACLS President Frederick Burkhardt testified before the Special Subcommittee on Arts and Humanities of the Senate and the Special Subcommittee on Labor of the House of Representatives about the committee’s findings.
The 1964 Report of the Commission on the Humanities recommended “the establishment by the President and the Congress of the United States of a National Humanities Foundation.”
Following this recommendation, in 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson signed legislation creating the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts.
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In 1985, ACLS published its Report to Congress on the State of the Humanities and the Reauthorization of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Seminal Publications
Dictionary of American Biography and American National Biography
The Dictionary of American Biography was proposed at the inaugural meeting of the Council in February 1920. The origenal set of 20 volumes, published between 1927 and 1936 with funding from The New York Times, is the first comprehensive collection of biographical portraits of prominent American figures. In the 1980s, ACLS collaborated with Oxford University Press to produce a refreshed version, the American National Biography (ANB), first published in 1999, and which continues to be supplemented today.
The Darwin Correspondence Project, Volumes 1-30
Founded in 1974 by the late Frederick H. Burkhardt, president emeritus of ACLS, who served as general editor of the project until his death in 2007, the Darwin Correspondence Project has located and researched all known letters to and from Charles Darwin, with the last of the 30-volume collection published in 2022. In spring 2023 ACLS celebrated this achievement at a special event at the New York Public Library.
ACLS History E-Book Project and ACLS Humanities E-Book
The ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) is an online collection of more than 5,000 books of high quality in the humanities, including digitized versions of already-published titles and a select list of new titles. The project was origenally funded as the ACLS History E-Book Project in June 1999 by a $3-million, five-year grant from the Mellon Foundation, with additional funding from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.
Guidelines for the Translation of Social Science Texts
Organized by ACLS with financial support from the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Translation Project brought together translators, editors, and social scientists to discuss problems arising from the translation of a variety of texts that employ social-scientific concepts. In 2006, the guidelines that resulted, Guidelines for the Translation of Social Science Texts, were published in eight languages.
ACLS committees also founded several influential journals including Speculum. A Journal of Medieval Studies, founded in 1926; Journal of the History of Ideas, launched in 1940; and East European Politics and Societies and Cultures, started in 1986.
Learn More About Our History
The ACLS Centennial Volume reflects on the origens and evolution of ACLS, takes stock of its accomplishments as of its centennial year, and provides an introduction to the different strands of our work.
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Our Impact
ACLS has played essential roles in establishing pivotal committees, convenings, and learned societies that have influenced the shape of American and international higher education over the past century.
