30 June in the History of Psychology

On June 30:

1817 — The cornerstone was laid for the Fayette Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky. The Fayette Hospital was supported by a citizen's group led by Andrew McCalla, but lack of funds left the building unoccupied until 1822, when it was purchased by the state of Kentucky and opened as the Eastern Lunatic Asylum on May 1, 1824. If the founding date of 1817 is used, the hospital is the second or third state mental hospital in the United States.

1860 — A famous debate was held between Thomas Henry Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce of the Church of England on the subject of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.

1900 — The Institut Psychologique International was founded, under the auspices of Pierre Janet, to study paranormal phenomena, such as telepathy. Prominent scientists and philosophers served on the institute's governing council.

1904 — Karl F. Heiser was born. Heiser, who was both an academic and practicing clinical psychologist, was one of the authors of the first psychology certification law in the United States, adopted by Connecticut in 1945. The law provided statutory recognition of professional training, established the doctorate as the professional degree, and provided the public with a means of discriminating among care providers.

1940 — Administration of the oldest U.S. federal mental hospital, St. Elizabeth's in Washington, DC, was transferred from the Department of the Interior to the Federal Security Agency, in the first of many moves. Others were to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (April 11, 1953), to the National Institute of Mental Health (August 9, 1967), and to the District of Columbia (October 1, 1987).

1947 — Walter Van Dyke Bingham retired from his post as chief psychologist of the U.S. War Department during World War II. During his term of service, Bingham developed and administered the Army General Classification Test, a landmark instrument in personnel psychology.

1965 — In a White House ceremony, Sargent Shriver, the director of Project Head Start, presented a flag with the new Head Start insignia to Lady Bird Johnson, the honorary chairman of Project Head Start. The flag was red, white, and blue with a design of building blocks and an arrow pointing upward. The day had been declared Head Start Day by President Johnson in a cabinet statement on June 19, 1965.

1967 — The APA first contracted to sell machine-readable entries from Psychological Abstracts to an external agency, the National Clearinghouse for Mental Health Information at the National Institute of Mental Health. The contracted price was $22 per abstract.

1994 — The first American Psychological Society (APS) Institute on the Teaching of Psychology was held in conjunction with the APS convention in Washington, DC. Douglas Bernstein, of the University of Illinois, was instrumental in organizing this event. In 2006, the APS changed its name to the Association for Psychological Science.