On October 15, 2018, the American Academy co-hosted a panel discussion on Article One of the United States Constitution along with the Massachusetts Historical Society. The panel was broadcast on C-SPAN. Dr. Fanton gave the following remarks as introduction.
Good evening. I am Jonathan Fanton, President of the American Academy. It is my pleasure to welcome you this evening to the first of a series of annual programs offered in partnership with the Massachusetts Historical Society. As many of you here tonight will know, the Academy was founded in 1780, and the Historical Society was founded in 1791.
We felt that a partnership between our two institutions would be not only logical but appropriate, and that there would be no better topic for a collaborative program than an event that took place between the founding of our two institutions: the writing of the U.S. Constitution.
The Academy and the Historical Society have a long history together. 17 of the 29 signatories to the Society’s Act of Incorporation were Academy members. And in fact Jeremy Belknap founded the Historical Society in part because he felt that the Academy’s early focus was too heavily slanted towards the sciences and natural history, and that a new institution was necessary to “establish a library to house historical sources.” Our two institutions, with their distinct missions and common values, came together in the 1890s to share space at the Boston Athenaeum for two years while the Society’s current building on Boylston Street was being built. In return, the Society generously housed the Academy as a tenant from 1899 to 1906 and again for a period of time in 1911. More recently, in 1991, we hosted the bicentennial meeting of the Society in the Academy’s Cambridge headquarters, which featured a keynote address by Senator Edward Kennedy, who presented the Kennedy Medal to the distinguished Harvard historian and Academy member Oscar Handlin. So we are delighted to be partnering with MHS yet again. Continue reading Introductory Remarks for “All Legislative Powers…”: Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution, Then and Now