Maureen O’Donnell Secretary of the American Friends of the Hakluyt Society c/o The John Carter Brown Library, Box 1894 Providence, RI 02912 Email:
The American Friends of the Hakluyt Society exists as a non-profit corporation to promote and to help provide financial support from the United States for the publication of scholarly editions of records of voyages, travels and other geographical material of the past, and to cooperate with other organizations having similar objectives, in particular, the Hakluyt Society in London.
Many of the Hakluyt Society's publications relate to the history of the Americas, and there has been a significant number of American scholars who are among the editors. Moreover, the Society's goal of making foreign language records of geographical exploration in all parts of the globe more accessible through sound, scholarly editions in English is of great benefit to students, scholars, and general readers in this country.
The American Friends of the Hakluyt Society welcomes gifts in support of this work. The United States Internal Revenue Service has registered the American Friends under article 501 (c) (3) of the US tax code. Donations are tax deductible in the United States and are separate from membership in the Hakluyt Society itself.
The American Friends was founded in 1996 at the John Carter Brown Library in conjunction with the 150th anniversary celebration of the Hakluyt Society, appropriately marking the fact that the founder of that collection, the Rhode Island merchant John Carter Brown (1797-1874), began his collection in 1846 and was the first American to join the Society as a charter member in that same year.
The John Carter Brown Library currently acts as the host to the American Friends office. The Library is an independently funded and administered institution for advanced research in history and the humanities located at Brown University since 1904. The Library's collection is exclusively focused on the history of the Americas, North and South, from the time of the earliest anticipation of Columbus's first voyage to the end of the colonial period in the Western hemisphere, ca. 1825.
