The American Council of Learned Societies was formed in 1919 to support humanistic learning in the United States and to represent American scholarship abroad. When John William Ward became President of the ACLS in 1982, he believed that the ACLS's tradition of high caliber scholarship and teaching should be commemorated through an annual lecture delivered by a distinguished humanist on the "life of learning." As a result of Ward's vision, each year since 1983 the American Council of Learned Societies has invited one of America's leading scholars to deliver the Haskins Lecture, in honor of Charles Homer Haskins, a distinguished scholar and teacher who was instrumental in the founding of the ACLS.