American Association for the Advancement of Science. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) was founded in 1848 to facilitate communication among scientists and to establish an authoritative public presence for science in the larger community.
Growing out of the Association of American Geologists and Naturalists (1840), the early AAAS drew inspiration from the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1832). Its peripatetic annual meetings and published
Proceedings soon made it the most distinguished national scientific organization. Leadership came from such eminent scientists as Joseph
Henry of the
Smithsonian Institution, Alexander Dallas Bache of the U.S. Coast Survey, William Barton Rogers of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Louis
Agassiz of Harvard University, all of whom shared a commitment to positioning scientific research in the foreground of public culture.
The growing sectional crisis and other factors led to a decline in membership and the cancellation of the 1861 meeting. The creation of the
National Academy of Sciences (1863) and the growth of specialized scientific organizations, such as the American Chemical Society (1874), made postwar recovery difficult. Restructured and incorporated in the 1870s, the AAAS increased its membership and created a research fund. The psychologist James McKeen Cattell merged his journal
Science into the AAAS in 1900 and in other aspects revitalized the organization. In 1907 the Smithsonian Institution provided office space and in 1945 the AAAS acquired its own headquarters in
Washington, D.C. In Cattell's vision, the elitist National Academy of Sciences would be the upper house of American science, while the AAAS would serve as the lower house, accessible to all scientists and responsive to the public. In the 1920s, to create a united scientific front on matters of mutual concern, the AAAS encouraged the affiliation of specialized societies. During the late twentieth century the AAAS advocated scientific education, encouraged racial and gender diversity in the scientific community, and addressed issues of public policy and scientific ethics.
See also
Coast and Geodedic Survey, U.S.;
Science: Revolutionary War to World War I;
Science: From 1914 to 1945;
Science: Since 1945.
Bibliography
Robert H. Kargon , The Maturing of American Science: A Portrait of Science in Public Life Drawn from the Presidential Addresses of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1974.
Sally Gregory Kohlstedt,, Michael A. Sokal,, and and Bruce V. Lewenstein , The Establishment of Science in America: 150 Years of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1999.
Sally Gregory Kohlstedt
