Each volume comprises one or more monographs, many of which are issued also as separates.

This work relates selected events in the history of the National Academy focusing on the terms of the various presidents from the first, Alexander D. Bache, the great grandson of Benjamin Franklin, to the most recent, Ralph Cicerone.

"American Forests is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that explore the impact of forestry on natural and human landscapes since the mid-nineteenth century. It has two main goals: to present some of the most compelling arguments that have guided our understanding of the complex and evolving relationship between trees and people in the United States, and to point out those aspects of this tangled interaction that we have yet fully to understand or to articulate."--Preface, ix.

Ronald C. Tobey provides a provocative analysis of the movement to establish a national science program in the early twentieth century. Led by several influential scientists, who had participated in centralized scientific enterprises during World War I, the new effort to conjoin science and society was an attempt to return to earlier progressive values with the hope of producing science for society's benefit. The movement was initially undermined by the new physics, and Einstein's theories of relativity, which shattered traditional views and alienated the American public. Nationalized research programs were tempered by the conservatism of corporate donors. Later, with the disintegration of progressivism, the gap between science and society made it impossible for the two cultures to unite.