[1][2] The Institute was founded during the height of World War II, on 12 May 1942,[3]: 16  by Polish scholars, including historian Stanisław Kot,[4] anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, poet Jan Lechoń, and historians Oskar Halecki and Rafał Taubenschlag, to continue the work and tradition of the prewar Polish Academy of Learning (Polska Akademia Umiejętności), headquartered in Kraków, Poland, which had been destroyed by Nazi Germany in 1939.

Since World War II, the Institute has continued its work of promoting Polish and Polish-American excellence in learning, and of advancing the knowledge of Polish history and culture in the English-speaking world.

Since its creation, the Institute has included some 1,500 scholars and artists, including Zbigniew Brzeziński, Jan Henryk De Rosen, Stanisław Skrowaczewski, Aleksander Wolszczan, Hilary Koprowski, Waclaw Szybalski, Michael Novak, Bohdan Pawłowicz and Nobel Prize winners Roald Hoffmann, Czesław Miłosz and Frank Wilczek.

One of the major areas of the Institute's research has been the history of Poles in the United States.

[3]: 16–17 The Institute maintains a library and archives, and publishes a peer-reviewed scholarly quarterly, The Polish Review.