American Peace Society

The American Peace Society was a pacifist group founded upon the initiative of William Ladd, in New York City, May 8, 1828. It was formed by the merging of many state and local societies, from New York, Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, of which the oldest, the New York Peace Society, dated from 1815. Ladd was an advocate of a "Congress and High Court of Nations." It was the first nationally based secular peace organization in the United States history. The society organized peace conferences and regularly published a periodical entitled Advocate of Peace. Its most famous leader was Benjamin Franklin Trueblood (1847-1916), a Quaker who in his book "The Federation of the World" (1899) called for the establishment of an international state to bring about lasting peace in the world. In 1834 the headquarters of the society were removed to Hartford, in 1834 to Boston, in 1911 to Washington, D.C. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_International_Encyclopedia] The group is now based in Washington

The American Peace Society house, its headquarters from 1911 to 1948 near the White House, is a U.S. National Historic Landmark.

Sources:
*Oxford Dictionary of the U.S. Military. Oxford University Press, 2001
*Dictionary of American History by James Truslow Adams, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940

External links

* [http://www.swarthmore.edu/library/peace/ The records of the American Peace Society, housed at the Swarthmore College Peace Collection]