In 2002, the Academy’s Initiative on Humanities and Culture issued its first Occasional Paper, Making the Humanities Count–a study of the need for a systematic and sustained effort to collect data on the state of the humanities in the United States. The Academy took up the challenge, and on January 7, 2009, it launched a prototype set of statistics: the Humanities Indicators.

Alexei V. Filippenko discusses supernovae and the accelerating expansion of the universe.

This online data set – the first of its kind – attracted extensive attention in the news media and in the blogosphere and the website received more than 250,000 hits originating from 38 countries. The prototype includes 74 indicators and more than 200 tables and charts.

Saving democracy might require mandatory voting — and Massachusetts can lead the way. Miles Rapoport, of the Academy's Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship, and Alex Keyssar make the case for universal voting.

Financial Statements

For 240 years, the nation has looked to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to offer wisdom and insight into the most profound issues of the time. In 1780, that was the formation of a free republic. In the 1850s, it was understanding the changing natural environment through the theory of evolution. In 1960, it was the creation and exploration of a field called arms control – in fact, the Academy coined that term. Today, it includes such questions as how we can sustain the dream of American democracy in the face of widening divides; and how as citizens of our planet we can respond to environmental change and its implications for migration, conflict, public health, and natural resources in order to provide for a more promising global future.

For 240 years, the nation has looked to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to offer wisdom and insight into the most profound issues of the time. In 1780, that was the formation of a free republic. In the 1850s, it was understanding the changing natural environment through the theory of evolution. In 1960, it was the creation and exploration of a field called arms control – in fact, the Academy coined that term. Today, it includes such questions as how we can sustain the dream of American democracy in the face of widening divides; and how as citizens of our planet we can respond to environmental change and its implications for migration, conflict, public health, and natural resources in order to provide for a more promising global future.

Stephen Heintz, cochair of the Academy’s Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship, says Biden’s single most important step in his first 100 days is to establish a White House Office for Democracy.

While much of the discussion about the state of the humanities tends to focus on the declining number of students majoring in the humanities, the health of the field relies on a much wider array of practices. The American Academy’s Humanities Indicators project has been exploring this wider frame of humanities activity by compiling data from federal sources and conducting the first national survey about the health of the field.

The American Academy's Humanities Indicators project provides new indicators on Americans' dwindling engagement with books, the types of texts they are reading, changing attitudes about censorship, and student reading proficiency.

Richard Saller, Elaine Treharne, Franco Moretti, Joshua Cohen, and Michael A. Keller discussed the humanities in the context of rapidly developing new technologies.

A national survey of the public from June 2024 offers insights into how often the public engages with various aspects of the arts and humanities.

Barbara J. Meyer accepts the Francis Amory Prize and gives a brief presentation about the fundamentals of sex and death.

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

At a meeting sponsored by the American Academy, the Royal Society, and the Carnegie Institution for Science, Wendy Freedman (Crawford H. Greenewalt Chair and Director of Carnegie Observatories at the Carnegie Institution for Science) and Martin Rees (Fellow of Trinity College; Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge; Astronomer Royal; and Visiting Professor at Imperial College London and at Leicester University) discussed what we know and do not know about the universe.

An examination of the financial advantage earning a bachelor’s degree, in any major, provides over not attaining the degree.

Some notable patterns have emerged in a series of surveys surveys asking about public engagement with various types of humanistic and artistic content.

Giving by private foundations to the humanities more than doubled during the past decade, according to a new study conducted and published by the Foundation Center in collaboration with the American Academy of Arts & Sciences