Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences : The Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences is a national federation of scholarly disciplines and learned societies. Its history dates back to the 1940s when leading Canadian scholars, in the interest of strengthening scholarship and collaboration, founded the Canadian Social Science Research Council and the Humanities Research Council of Canada. The councils were created to lobby for better funding for their respective disciplines following the Depression and to respond to threats of the elimination of core curricula in universities during the Second World War. The two councils organized regional and national symposia, launched large-scale research projects, assisted with the creation of scholarly associations and developed important funding programs for research and publishing. Until the founding of the Canada Council in 1957, both organizations relied on funding from American philanthropic organizations, including the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation, to administer their programs. As the government took over the management of research support programs, first through the Canada Council and then, with its creation in 1978, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the scholarly development, collaboration and dissemination functions remained with the two councils, then renamed the Social Science Federation of Canada (SSFC) and the Canadian Federation for the Humanities (CFH) to distinguish them from the government agency.
The CFH and SSFC amalgamated in 1996 to form the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, in a move that was precipitated by the elimination of core funding for the federations from SSHRC. Amalgamation also served the interest of ensuring a more powerful and effective voice for the community as a whole. The Federation is best known today for its administration of the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, which supports and adjudicates most academic publishing in Canada, and its organization of the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, better known as the "Learneds". Throughout its existence, the Federation has endeavoured to nurture cultural, political and intellectual freedom; shape public policy; enhance intellectual productivity; and apply research in the humanities and social sciences research to the common good.
