We've had an official position of historian at least since 1885, when our current constitution was adopted.
We published our
History of Phi Kappa Psi in 1902. We published our two volume
Centennial History of Phi Kappa Psi in 1952, which is available to anyone for $35 through our HQ. The first volume of the latter covers the same time period of the former, but they are not the same. We will soon be publishing a third volume to our history covering 1952-2002.
Phi Psi occasionally prints historical articles in our magazine,
The Shield.
The most recent edition has an outstanding article commemorating the 125th anniversary of
The Shield. Here is a link to a PDF document containing that article:
http://www.phikappapsi.com/intraclub...oc_number=1012
It features Edgar Fahs Smith, a Phi Psi from Franklin & Marshall. He helped start our Penn chapter in 1877, where he remained on the faculty for his career. Something left out of the article, due to space limitations, was an act of interfraternalism in an era when interfraternalism didn't really exist. While acting as editor of
The Shield, he subscribed to many fraternity magazines. One of these was
ATW's. He read how
ATW was experiencing difficulty expanding into the North, because of prejudice against Southerners at this point in American history. Edgar F. Smith believed that
ATW had noble values, and deserved to be treated better than they were. He recruited men in the Chemistry Department, who were not in fraternities, to form a petitioning group to
ATW. They were granted a charter, and the founding members of this
ATW chapter went on to charter several (10+?) chapters over the next few years. Anyone who has a copy of
Baird's can look up
ATW and read the section on their extension. It mentions Brother Smith.