American Academy of Political and Social Science

• 1. Introduction

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  The American Academy of Political and Social Science was born in 1889 out of a conviction that scientific thought and practical effort needed each other. Professor Edmund J. James, drawing on colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania, Swarthmore College, and Bryn Mawr College, set out to build a bridge between the laboratory and the legislature. From its first day, the AAPSS welcomed women as members, a step that stood apart from many learned societies of the era. Its earliest presidents included distinguished public servants alongside scholars, and its list of members would eventually grow to include Herbert Hoover and Frances Perkins.

  What kind of organization allows a politician and a labor secretary to sit alongside professors? What does it take to keep a journal running without a single interruption for more than a century? And how does a Victorian academic society remake itself for a world of congressional briefings and internet forums? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. A Journal That Never Stopped

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  In July 1890, the first issue of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science arrived in readers' hands. It has not missed a cycle since. What started as a quarterly became a bi-monthly publication with volume 2 in the summer of 1891, and the editorial rhythm has continued in that form ever since.

  Thorsten Sellin edited the journal from September 1929 through July 1968, a tenure stretching nearly four decades across the Depression, a world war, and the postwar transformation of American society. The topics The Annals chose to examine trace the preoccupations of each generation. In November 1917, the journal focused on the world's food supply. By May 1941, the title was "America and Japan." The May 1982 volume addressed the global refugee problem. More recently, editors have turned to nuclear terrorism and revisited the Moynihan Report four decades after its first publication.

  Since 1981, SAGE Publications has handled publishing. In 2003, the journal shed its traditional plain orange cover for a more graphic design incorporating photographs. The Annals carries a 2017 impact factor of 2.401, placing it 33rd out of 169 journals in political science and 11th out of 94 in interdisciplinary social sciences. Recent contributors have included Henry Louis Gates Jr., Richard A. Clarke, Joseph S. Nye Jr., and William Julius Wilson.

• 3. Difficult Topics, Deliberate

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  Booker T. Washington delivered a paper at the AAPSS annual meeting in 1901, when the subject was race relations in America. That choice of topic was not an accident. The academy's founders had built into its mission a commitment not to avoid difficult questions in the social sciences. The early journal supplemented its volumes with pamphlet publications on contested issues, and annual meetings were designed to surface rather than sidestep controversy.

  This orientation toward practice as well as scholarship shaped the academy's membership in ways that set it apart from purely academic bodies. Its roster was always open to educated professionals rather than restricted to university faculty. That inclusive stance may explain why the AAPSS is not a member of the American Council of Learned Societies, which tends to draw from more narrowly academic institutions. The academy's reach into public life made it something harder to categorize.

• 4. Fellows and the Moynihan Prize

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  In 2000, the academy introduced its Fellows program, formally recognizing social scientists who had made outstanding contributions to the field. The selection began to give the AAPSS a way to honor the breadth of its intellectual community beyond the journal's pages.

  Eight years later, in 2008, the academy established the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize, awarded annually to public officials and scholars who have applied social science and informed judgment to the public good. Alice M. Rivlin was the first recipient, in 2008. The list of subsequent winners reads like a roll call of figures who moved between research and policy: David T. Ellwood, Paul Volcker, Joseph Stiglitz, Samantha Power, and William Nordhaus. Diane Ravitch won in 2011; Alan Krueger in 2017; Marian Wright Edelman in 2022. The prize carries the name of the senator and sociologist whose 1965 report on the African American family sparked decades of debate, a debate the academy itself revisited in a later volume of The Annals.

• 5. Leadership and Long Tenures

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  Edmund J. James served as both founding president and first editor of The Annals, holding the presidency from 1889 through 1895. Leo S. Rowe then led the academy from 1902 through 1929, a run of more than two decades that spanned the Progressive Era and the First World War. Ernest M. Patterson followed, presiding from 1930 through 1952. Marvin E. Wolfgang held the role from 1972 through 1998, another quarter-century tenure.

  Kathleen Hall Jamieson served briefly in 1998 and 1999, followed by Jaroslav Pelikan through 2001. Douglas S. Massey led from 2006 through 2015, and Kenneth Prewitt from 2015 through 2021. Marta Tienda assumed the presidency in 2021 and currently holds the role. The academy is now headquartered at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the same institution whose faculty helped found it more than a century earlier.

• 6. Into the Digital Age

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  In 2006, the academy launched a blog to extend its conversations into the emerging world of online publishing. The move was modest by the standards of digital media, but it reflected a broader shift in how the AAPSS positioned itself. The academy's website became the primary channel for news, recently published Annals volumes, and information about the Fellows program and the Moynihan Prize.

  The academy had already moved away from the membership model that defined its early decades. The open, inclusive membership of the founding years, which had brought in Herbert Hoover and Frances Perkins alongside professors, gave way to a structure built more around publications, congressional briefings, special conferences, and biannual board meetings. The Annals, which began as a quarterly in 1890, remains the academy's most durable presence, and William Julius Wilson has appeared in its pages both as a contributor and as a Moynihan Prize winner in 2013.