Cosmos Club

The Cosmos Club in February 2010

The Cosmos Club is a private club in Washington, DC in the United States. It was founded in 1878 by John Wesley Powell in common with Clarence Edward Dutton, Henry Smith Pritchett, William Harkness and John Shaw Billings. One of his goals is " the training of its members in science, literature and art." The members of the Cosmos Club already listed a variety of carriers of the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

History

Originally, the members of the club met at the Corcoran building on the corner of 15th and F Street in the district of North West, but the meeting point of the park was in 1882 transferred to the President's. There the members occupied on the east side of the park the Tayloe and the Cutts -Madison House and tore two intervening from standing detached in order to have more space. In 1952 the club by the federal government of the United States was asked to move, and he pulled on the 2121 Massachusetts Avenue in the district of Dupont Circle in its present home in the Townsend family house.

The building was constructed by the company Carrère and Hastings in 1898 in Beaux -Arts architecture and completed in 1901. Just a year later Mr. Townsend died, and after the death of Mrs. Townsend in 1931, her daughter Matilde moved with her husband Sumner Welles in the house where they lived until the beginning of World War II. The Cosmos Club purchased the house in 1950. 1973 it was included as a contributing property of the Dupont Circle Historic District and the Massachusetts Avenue Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places.

Since 1887, the Philosophical Society of Washington meets in the Assembly Hall of the Cosmos Club, which is now called the John Wesley Powell Auditorium. In 1888, the National Geographic Society was founded at the Cosmos Club, as well as the Wilderness Society in 1935.

In the first 110 years of its existence the club was exclusively for men as members. Guests invited women it was also prohibited to enter the club through the main entrance and reserved for members of rooms in the house. In 1988, the Washington Committee of Human Rights ruled that this misogynist politics of the club violates the anti-discrimination policies of the city. Since then, the club is also open to women.

In 1990, the first edition appeared the first of each year since 2004 but irregularly published magazine Cosmos: A Journal of Emerging Issues, in which the members of the club publish essays.

Awards

Members of the club can be honored with two different awards.

Cosmos Club Award

The Cosmos Club Award has been awarded since 1964 by the Cosmos Club Foundation annually to personalities of national and international importance in a non- pre-specified fields of science, literature or art, in a teaching profession or in public service. Bearers of this award include Edwin Land, Paul Volcker, Charles Everett Koop, James Van Allen, Arthur Kornberg, Sandra Day O'Connor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Elie Wiesel. In 2012, Philippe de Montebello was honored accordingly.

John P. McGovern Award

This prize is awarded since 1986 and is named after its founder John P. McGovern. The honored with this award personalities hold talks publicly accessible on the premises of the club to their respective fields. Among the best known carriers include J. Craig Venter, Mstislav Rostropovich, Stephen J. Gould, Edward O. Wilson, Saul Bellow, Derek Jacobi and Leonard Slatkin.