Book excerpt: When Jeremy Belknap and seven associates met in Boston on January 24, 1791, to establish the Massachusetts Historical Society, there was nothing like it anywhere in North America. Belknap, concerned that accident and carelessness were jeopardizing America's documentary heritage, proposed an organization to provide a secure repository for rare manuscripts and printed works and a publication program to "multiply the copies" of these valuable items. The Society that eight Boston gentlemen created that evening was the first institution anywhere for "the collection and preservation of materials for a political and natural history of the United States". The Massachusetts Historical Society: A Bicentennial History, 1791-1991, is a candid and detailed account of this remarkable institution's first two centuries. Despite its location and its name, the Society has never been a provincial institution, dedicated to chronicling the story of a single city or state. Through its incomparable library and publications, as well as through the writings of such illustrious members as Belknap, Francis Parkman, William Hickling Prescott, Samuel Eliot Morison, and scores of modern scholars, the Society has been - and continues to be - a profound influence on the study of a nation's history.