American Academy of Arts and Sciences

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) is an organization dedicated to scholarship and the advancement of learning. It serves as a nationwide honor society for the United States.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and John Hancock founded the Academy in Boston during the American Revolution. Their objective, as stated in its charter, was to "cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honour, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people." They were joined by Robert Treat Paine and 58 local community leaders to charter the organization in 1780. Other prominent men soon joined, and early members included Benjamin Franklin (whose American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia provided a spur to the Boston leaders to create a more politically oriented society), George Washington,  Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. In terms of prestige, a Fellowship or a Foreign Honorary Membership of the Academy is regarded as second only to the Nobel Awards; in recent years, most Nobel Prize recipients were elected to the Fellowship prior to becoming Nobel laureates
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