United States. He also initiated work on what became the institution's 2-volume Calendar of Manuscripts in Paris Archives and Libraries Relating to the History of the Mississippi Valley to 1803. In his best-known archival-related activity he worked with J. Franklin Jameson to provide documentation for the campaign to establish the National Archives. In 1926 Congress voted funds for the building's construction, and it finally opened in 1934. Leland's influence on archival affairs, however, transcended his efforts on behalf of the National Archives. He conceived the first Conference of Archivists in the United States, which met at Columbia University in conjunction with the American Historical Association's 1909 Annual Meeting. He took this opportunity to introduce Americans to a variety of European concepts that soon became institutionalized as standard best practices in the United States and formed the basis for archival theory. His address at the 1909 conference on "American Archival Problems" remains a classic in the archival literature. Leland led a delegation of Americans to the First International Congress of Archivists and Librarians in Brussels in 1910, a meeting that set the stage for the growing global interchange of archival theories and concepts. He attended classes in Archive Economy at the Ecole des Chartres in 1913-1914, and continued to use American Historical Association gatherings as a venue to introduce such principles as provenance and original order to American audiences. Although he had moved away from direct participation in archival affairs by the 1920s, the Society of American Archivists recognized his contribution by electing him its second president in 1939. His two presidential addresses on "The Archivist in Times of Emergency" and "Historians and Archivists in the First World War" set an important scholarly tone for the fledgling professional association. Founding member and leader of ACLS and ICHS In 1923 the International Congress of Historical Sciences (ICHS) appointed a committee that, under Leland's guidance, led to the formation in 1926 of the International Committee of Historical Sciences. Leland initially served as the new group's treasurer and in 1938 became its president, a position he held for 10 years. During much of that period he also served as president of the Union Académique International (UAI). In 1919 Leland acted as organizing secretary for a meeting of representatives from leading American scholarly societies in the social sciences and the humanities that led to the formation of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), a