page_title: Society for the History of Discoveries
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Society for the History of Discoveries / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Jenkins Garrett presented with 21st Annual Walter Prescott Webb honor and lifetime membership in Society for the History of Discoveries. Left to right, Dennis Reinhartz (professor of history), Charles Lowry (UTA Library Director), and Jenkins Garrett.
context_page_description: Society for the History of Discoveries, founded in 1960, is an international, United States-based, organization formed to stimulate interest in teaching, research, and publishing the history of geographical exploration. Its members include those from several academic disciplines as well as archivists, non-affiliated scholars, and laypersons with an interest in history. SHD advances its goals by organizing annual meetings at which pertinent scholarly research papers are presented, by publishing a scholarly journal with articles on geographic exploration, and by annually offering an award to student research papers in the field. The Society is a US non-profit 501 organization administered by a voluntary and unpaid team of council members and officers. Membership is open to all who have an interest in the history of geographical exploration. It publishes a semiannual journal, Terrae Incognitae.
context_section_description: The origin of the Society for the History of Discoveries (SHD) can be traced back to the summer of 1960 at an academic conference in Lisbon, Portugal, that commemorated the quincentenery of the death of Prince Henry the Navigator.  American scholars John (Jack) Parker, Thomas (Thom) Goldstein, and Vsevolod (Steve) Slesarev, determined that there should be an organization in the United States that would encourage research into the history of exploration and discovery.  Later, in December 1960, Goldstein posted a notice at the New York City meeting of the American Historical Association inviting interested parties to meet at a nearby restaurant.  The people who attended that December 1960 luncheon constituted themselves as an executive board for a period of one year, and proceeded to organize SHD.
  At the beginning of 1961, there were a total of twenty-one members in the Society.  The appeal of this newly created learned Society was wide. Because there were no barriers to qualify for membership, within a short time historians, geographers, librarians, museum curators, archivists, philosophers, mathematicians, linguists, cartographers, navigators, medical doctors, editors, book sellers, book and map collectors, and independent scholars comprised the membership.  Also, because there were no gender barriers, women scholars readily found a friendly intellectual home, and not only were they among the earliest members attracted to the new Society, they quickly assumed leadership positions.  By 2010, the organization’s membership counted over three hundred people, and numerous institutions subscribe to the Society’s journal, Terrae Incognitae.
  The founding members established the major goals to stimulate interest in teaching, research, and publishing the history of geographical exploration. Since its inception, the scope of the Society's activities encompasses the discovery, exploration, and mapping of the earth's land and sea surface from earliest times to the present - the explorers and the explored.  Fields of specialization thus include the history of European expansion, the history of cartography, navigation, colonial settlement, biography, and bibliography.  To further its mission, the Society since 1969 has published annually a journal, Terrae Incognitae, and a newsletter, which since 2000 is titled Terra Cognita.
  Records of the Society are archived in Special Collections at The University of Texas at Arlington Library.
caption: Dennis Reinhartz (professor of history), Charles Lowry (UTA Library Director), and Jenkins Garrett in 1986; lifetime membership in the Society for the History of Discoveries being granted to Garrett
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