This online guide brings together photographs, engravings, lithographs, and paintings from a legacy APS collection known as the Prints and Photographs collection. The guide was created to provide online access to descriptive information for prints and photographs that were not associated with manuscripts collections. Some of these items are also described in the APS online public access catalog for printed materials. An in-house Print Collection card file arranged by name and subject provides item-level access to some of the items below and additional prints and photographs that do not yet have online descriptions. Former designations for these included the following: Persons, Places and things, Group pictures, Collections (manuscripts); Oversize--Persons, Oversize--Places and things, and Oversize--Collections (manuscripts). When researching at the library, please consult with reference staff to locate these items.

Though the Miscellaneous Manuscripts collection is composed of items that do not fall readily into any other existing collection, the two dominant intellectual areas represented in the collection are Early American History and History of Science.

Elsie Clews Parsons (1875-1941) was trained as a sociologist at Columbia University, but made her greatest achievements in the fields of anthropology and folklore. Parsons' early works in the field of sociology dealt primarily with gender roles, conventions of society, and the effect of society's pressures on the individual. After a trip to the American Southwest with her husband in 1910, Parsons' interests turned to anthropology. She began making field trips to Arizona and New Mexico and, under the influence of her friend Franz Boas, Parsons recorded in meticulous detail data on social organization, religious practices, and folklore of the Southwest Indians. Concurrently, Parsons conducted research in folklore, concentrating on folk tales of Afro-Americans and Caribbean peoples. She was active in a number of professional associations and was the associate editor of the Journal of American Folklore from 1918 until her death. The Parsons Papers were acquired as two separate accessions and remains organized in two distinct subcollections. Subcollection I (572 P35), acquired in 1949, contains approximately 12 linear feet of materials focused on Parsons' career in anthropology. Subcollection II, acquired in 1985, consists of 26.25 linear feet of materials divided into ten series, covering a larger scope of Parsons' life, including family and personal correspondence.