A Voyage of Discovery.

This article highlights the historical events that took place within 50 years since the American Statistical Association was founded in 1839 and the Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA) was first published in 1888. For the first years, JASA contained almost exclusively nonmathematical papers. Many were mere repositories of extensive data sets, including many compilations from census counts with interpretations of what these data purportedly revealed. Others were from investigations undertaken by sociologists, economists, political scientists and historians. One area that attracted theoretical attention dealt with the concepts of averages, variation and distributions. The second area that received theoretical attention during these years was correlation and related concepts.