Over the last few years, organizations across the United States – corporations, universities, and nonprofits like the American Academy – have begun to reflect on their ties to slavery, Native genocide, and other troubling elements of American history. The Academy’s virtual event on “Reckoning with Organizational History” explored why historical self-examination matters and what can be gained from these studies.

A new publication, which emerged from the Academy's Our Common Purpose work, proposes alternatives to the “winner-take-all” system used in most U.S. elections. The proposed alternatives have the potential to reduce partisan divides and virtually eliminate gerrymandering.

In the early 1800s, the Academy received reports of a sea serpent, described as 60 to 100 feet long, in what is now Maine’s Penobscot Bay. In 1810, upon hearing that the reports had been lost, minister and politician Alden Bradford, with the assistance of Lemuel Weeks, collected and presented to the Academy sworn statements of witnesses. In doing so, Bradford acknowledged, “Accounts of this sort, I am aware, should be received with caution.”

On March 31, 1999, Jared Diamond presented a condensed version of his talk on "How to Get Rich."

William G. Thomas III, Anne Cong-Huyen, Angel David Nieves, and Jessica Marie Johnson engaged in a panel discussion on pedagogy in undergraduate digital humanities classrooms. The discussion, which was presented in collaboration with Emory University, was moderated by Erika Farr. Stephen G. Nichols and G. Wayne Clough provided national perspectives as respondents to the panel.

Noteworthy

On October 6, 2018, the American Academy inducted its 238th class of Members at a ceremony held in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The ceremony featured readings from the letters of John and Abigail Adams by Katherine Farley and Jerry Speyer, a performance by André Watts, and presentations by Linda T. Elkins-Tanton, Huda Y. Zoghbi, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, Robert Gooding-Williams, and David Miliband.

Essays in the Fall 2009 issue of Dædalus on the global nuclear future examine the interconnected issues of a potential worldwide expansion of civilian nuclear power, attendant risks of weapons proliferation and nuclear terrorism, and the prospects for lessening the impact of climate change through growth in nuclear energy.

On October 11, 2025, the Academy inducted more than two hundred newly elected members during its annual Induction Ceremony. The program included brief remarks from five new members, each representing one of the Academy’s membership classes. Their talks addressed topics such as the transformative power of science, building trust in expertise in the age of biology, leading for breakthroughs, creating books that act as mirrors rather than windows, and the evolving impact of Title IX. The class speakers were Gregory H. Robinson (Class I: Mathematical and Physical Sciences), Ashish K. Jha (Class II: Biological Sciences), Brian Uzzi (Class III: Social and Behavioral Sciences), Jacqueline Woodson (Class IV: Humanities and Arts), and Christine Brennan (Class V: Leadership, Policy, and Communications). Edited versions of their remarks follow.

Reflections from Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on Receiving the Don M. Randel Award for Humanistic Studies

When forced to decide between a career in biochemistry or psychology in the spring of 1950, Jerome Kagan chose the latter because of a gnawing puzzlement provoked by the observation that apparently sane people living in the same community held different beliefs about love, honesty, and whom was entitled to respect and whom to scorn.

New data from the American Academy’s Humanities Indicators reveal a recent substantial shift toward bachelor’s and graduate degrees in the science, technology, engineering, and medical (STEM) fields; the data also highlight some of the underlying complexities in this shift.

We have entered a new nuclear era. The Cold War world dominated by only two nuclear superpowers no longer exists (even if Russia and the United States still possess the lion’s share of nuclear weapons); it has grown into a multipolar nuclear environment.

The Global Security and International Affairs program area draws on the expertise of policy-makers, practitioners, and scholars to foster knowledge and inform innovative and more substantial policies to address crucial issues affecting the global community. Projects underway in this area engage with pressing strategic, development, and moral questions that underpin relations among people, communities, and states worldwide. Each initiative embraces a broad conception of security as the interaction among human, national, and global security imperatives. Project recommendations move beyond the idea of security as the absence of war toward higher aspirations of collective peace, development, and justice.