American Lung Association
organization
The American Lung Association is a voluntary health organization whose mission is to save lives by improving lung health and preventing lung disease through education, advocacy, and research.
History
1904–1918: Founding
The organization was founded in 1904 to fight tuberculosis (TB) as the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis (NASPT) by Edward Livingston Trudeau, Robert Hall Babcock, Henry Martyn Hall, Lawrence Flick, and S. Adolphus Knopf. Earlier in 1892, Flick had founded the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Tuberculosis, the world's first society dedicated to the preventing TB. In 1907, the Lung Association began their Christmas Seal campaign to raise money for a small TB sanatorium in Delaware. Emily Bissell, a Red Cross volunteer at the time, created holiday seals to sell at the post office for a penny a piece. By the end of her fundraising campaign, she had raised more than ten times the amount needed to save the sanatorium, and the tradition of Christmas Seals was launched.
1918–1973
The NASPT was renamed the National Tuberculosis Association (NTA) in 1918, and then the National Tuberculosis and Respiratory Disease Association (NTRDA) in 1968; it adopted its current name in 1973.
1973–2018
The association is a defender of the Clean Air Act.
In 1978, Ethelene Crockett became the first woman and first African-American woman appointed president of the organization.
In October 2018, the association launched its school-based initiative, "Yoga Power", a program designed to increase awareness of the importance of lung health, at Woodward Elementary School in Delaware, Ohio.
Logo and tagline
A modified version of the Cross of Lorraine serves as the Lung Association's logo.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “American Lung Association” is organization. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through American, Lung and Association, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “organization” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q446094. VIAF identifies the subject as 140984469. The Library of Congress control number is n82052521. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1904, 1918, 1892 and 1907.
Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “American Lung Association”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow American Lung Association primary sources, American Lung Association archive and American research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “American Lung Association”?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
- Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “American Lung Association” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.