David Rittenhouse (1732-1796) was one of the most prominent American men of science of the 18th Century. A skilled instrument maker, Rittenhouse was the an astronomer, playing a major role in recording the 1769 Transit of Venus, among many accomplishments. Rittenhouse also conducted important survey work for the state of Pennsylvania, establishing the state's western border, as well as overseeing the completion of the Mason-Dixon survey. In addition to his scientific endeavors, Rittenhouse's work for American independence places him among the important founding fathers. Subordinating his scientific interests for the greater good of Pennsylvania during the American Revolution, Rittenhouse served as a member of both the Pennsylvania Assembly and the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention, and held powerful positions on the Pennsylvania Council of Safety and the subsequent Committee on Safety. Rittenhouse also served as the first director of the United States' Mint, at the behest of President George Washington. Rittenhouse was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1768 and played a major role in placing the Society on the scientific map. He held many positions in the Society, including serving as its President from 1791 until his death in 1796. The Rittenhouse papers span 1774 to 1932, and consist of 61 items, over 0.25 linear feet. The collection is comprised mainly of correspondence, but also includes receipts, genealogies and broadsides.

The collection of Charles Coleman Sellers (1903-1980) contains copious and detailed documentation of the art of Charles Willson Peale and his family. It consists of working files for Sellers's numerous publications, including his Portraits and Miniatures by Charles Willson Peale (1952); Charles Willson Peale with Patron and Populace (1969); C. W. Peale's Portraits of Washington (1951); Benjamin Franklin in Portraiture (1962); Mr. Peale's Museum (1980). Most files include photographs of the art work, notes on the piece, and correspondence with authorities or owners. Other series include one relating to the paintings of various other Peales, including Anna C., James, Mary Jane, Raphaelle, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Sarah Miriam, and a miscellaneous artist file, which includes the same type of material and information on many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists, including Thomas Eakins, George Healy, Robert Edge Pine, William Rush, Thomas Sully, Benjamin West, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, etc. There is a separate Sellers collection at Dickinson College, primarily personal in nature.

Recorded at the Tuscarora Reservation in Niagara County, New York from December 1950 to January 1951. Consists of Tuscarora vocabulary, paradigms, and stories regarding tribal history told in Tuscarora only.

Albert Charles Peale (1849-1913), the great-grandson of Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827), was a geologist for the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and its predecessor agency, a member of the Ferdinand Hayden expeditions that explored and mapped the western United States, an author in geology, mineralogy, and paleobotany, and an aide at the United States National Museum (today the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History). Edwin Roger Kirk (1884-1955) corresponded with Frank Springer about crinoids; assisted Edward Ulrich in studying sediments of the Appalachians; surveyed the Rocky Mountains, the Great Basin, and southeastern Alaska as a USGS paleontologist; and collected the papers of Peale and other geologists. Peale's correspondence (1868-1912, bulk 1870s-80s) relate to various federal geological expeditions. Letters between Peale and William Rush Taggart, the largest single portion of the series, focus on matters of congressional funding. Kirk's series (1900-09) contains the correspondence of Kirk and other geologists; most frequent are letters from Frank Springer to Kirk relating to rock formations. The collection also contains several diaries and sketchbooks from Peale (bulk 1872-77), including those kept during the Hayden expeditions, correspondence relating to the Geological Survey of Kentucky (1888-1893), and miscellaneous letters and memorabilia (c. 1820s-1940s), often relating to the Peale family.

In 1892, the physician and medical administrator Simon Flexner began research on cerebrospinal meningitis, a meningococcal disease with an untreated mortality rate between 70 and 90%. Experimenting on monkeys, Flexner developed a promising serum treatment for the disease by 1903, which he used extensively during the epidemic outbreaks of meningitis in New York City in 1904-1905 and 1907. For several years, Flexner kept his serum under his close supervision, with the result that the Rockefeller Institute became the primary source for knowledge about meningitis and its treatment. The 8 linear feet of Records amassed at the Rockefeller Institute between 1907 and 1913 document Simon Flexner's deployment of his serum treatment for cerebrospinal meningitis and his on-going interest in the epidemiology, etiology, and treatment of the disease. The collection consists largely of patient records, with data on hospitals and physicians to whom Flexner has dispensed his serum.

These are copies of letters and printed and mimeographed reports relating principally to breakwaters at Aransas Pass, Texas, and Manasquan Inlet, N.J. There are also 12 blueprints and 7 drawings of devices for reclaiming beaches.

Henry Howard Houston II (1895-1918) was the son of a prominent Philadelphia family, the Houstons. He enjoyed a privileged upbringing, graduating from Chestnut Hill Academy in 1912 and from the University of Pennsylvania in 1916. Upon his graduation date, he enlisted in Battery C of the First Field Artillery, Pennsylvania National Guard, and was sent to the Texas and New Mexico borders in response to Pancho Villa's raids from Mexico. In January 1917, he volunteered with the American Field Ambulance Service in France during World War I, stationed near Verdun, where he was constantly under fire when performing his duty to pick up wounded soldiers from the trenches. Henry took a commission in the French Army and enrolled in its transportation school. The French government awarded him the Croix de Guerre for gallantry under fire. When the U.S. entered the war, Henry resigned his commission in the French army and rejoined the Pennsylvania National Guard, his unit being the 53rd Field Artillery Brigade, 28th Division. He returned to the U.S. and received training as an aerial observer at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Early in 1918 he returned to France as a staff member of the 53rd Field Artillery Brigade, commandedn by General William Price. In August 1918, Lt. Houston was killed south of Arcis-le-Ponsart while returning from an air field. He was 23. The bulk of this eight linear feet collection reflects Henry's personal life as a son, soldier, friend and lover, during the last three years of his life 1916 to 1918.

This is part of the large inventory for the Benjamin Franklin Papers (Mss B F85). For complete information concerning this collection, please view the Collection Description .

During the half century leading up to the Second World War, Franz Boas helped to define academic anthropology in the United States. Trained as a geographer at the University of Heidelberg, Boas worked initially on the Inuit of Baffin Island and subsequently on the cultures of the Indians of the Northwest Pacific Coast, becoming a leading figure in American anthropology by the first decade of the twentieth century. As Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, Boas made significant theoretical contributions to ethnology, linguistics, and physical anthropology, helping to ingrain the four fields approach in his discipline and introducing the concept of cultural relativism into wide currency. He was, as well, a committed Socialist and an ardent opponent of both racism and fascism. This collection includes correspondence that Boas carried on with his colleagues in anthropology, as well as with those in the other social sciences and sciences. This correspondence is rich as a source for twentieth-century historians interested in "radical" social causes, since Boas was a socialist and an outspoken voice for progressive social causes.

These papers include correspondence, marriage settlements, legal papers, genealogical tables, and memoranda of William Montgomerie of Brigend, Scotland, who emigrated to East Jersey, ca. 1701. Also includes the pedigree of Alexander Forbes of Balogie; correspondence (to 1755) of John Burnet, who was a merchant of Edinburgh, London, and New York, and of John Burnet, Jr., of Perth Amboy, N.J., with Elizabeth Forbes; genealogy of the Montgomery family in the United States, prepared by Thomas H. Montgomery (1853); and a seventeenth-century copy of documents, accounts, and patents of East Jersey.

Journal ("Journal historique concernant l'établisement des français à la Louisianne; tiré des mémoires de Mrs. D'Iberville & de Bienville") from first French contact through failure of settlement at St. Bernard, commanded by La Harpe. Includes brief essays at end, including a summary of various theories of the origins of the American Indians.

Black and white, Wedgwood, porcelain pitcher. Front: full-length portrait of Washington Irving, reclining on the ground with a dog and his signature at bottom. Encircled by ivy border. Reverse: image of a country house at top. "A pretty country retreat is like a pretty wife - one is always throwing away money in decorating it" at bottom. Underside: "Washington Irving / 1783-1859 / Commemorating the 175th anniversary of his birth, April 3, 1958 / Sleep Hollow Restorations Tarrytown, New York On The Tappan Zee." Tape with illegible ID on bottom.

This is part of the large inventory for the Benjamin Franklin Papers (Mss B F85). For complete information concerning this collection, please view the Collection Description .

The papers include miscellaneous letters, letterbooks, books, certificates, and diplomas of various members of the Muhlenberg family. Among them are photostats of letters and papers of General John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg and officers of the Continental Army on military affairs in the Southern Department during the American Revolution (1772-1804); photostats of letters to Albert Gallatin, Nathanael Greene, Edward Hand, Winthrop Sargent, Baron von Steuben, William Alexander, and George Washington; photostat of General Muhlenberg's journal of trips to the Ohio (1784, 1797); photostats of letters and notes of Gotthilf H. E. Muhlenberg, including a diary kept at Halle (1771) and extracts of thirty letters to Stephen Elliott of Beaufort and Charleston, South Carolina (1808-1815); photostats of letters of Henry A. Muhlenberg about his biography of General Muhlenberg (1848-1849); and photostats of letters of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg (1711-1787). Also included is an original letterbook of Peter Muhlenberg, paymaster of the United States Army, kept at Augusta and Savannah, Georgia (1836-1842). Henry Muhlenberg's notebooks (1784-1813), written in Latin or German script, in a small hand, includes a wealth of botanical observations, with a focus on Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The Henry Muhlenberg journals are a record of daily occurrences, with many features of a commonplace book, containing prescriptions, notes of questions asked candidates for the Lutheran ministry, and the plan of a barn. There is also a biographical account of Rev. Henry Melchior Muhlenberg (1711-1787).

This collection consists of correspondence, manuscripts, drawings, diaries, notebooks, and photographs. Sanderson began his travels in the jungles of Asia and Africa before starting his formal schooling at Eton and Cambridge in the late 1920s and early 1930s. His papers reflect his interest in animals, jungles, and natural history. Late in his life Sanderson's interest turned to UFO's and he was the director of the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained.

The papers consist of correspondence, diaries, journals, financial records, writings, lectures, reproductions of sketches and documents which detail the lives of three generations of the Peale family. Material relating to the Peale Museum is also included.

These papers include letters, reports, accounts, and memoranda relating to the work of the American Board of Home Missions among the Abnaki, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Dakota, Mackinaw, Maumee, Mayhaw, Ojibwa, Osage, Pawnee, Penobscot, Sioux, and Stockbridge Indians of Arkansas, New York, and Oregon.

These records represent volumes 21-22 of the Society's archive of documents relating to North America, and includes letters to and from Pennsylvanians, or the missionaries sent there, and a few from New York, and from Massachusetts.