From the 1920s through the 1940s, the University of Pennsylvania anthropologist Frank Gouldsmith Speck worked on Cherokee language and culture with his primary consultant, Will West Long. Raised in Big Cove, North Carolina, Long was a respected elder and spent much of his adult life attempting to record and preserve traditional Cherokee culture. The Speck Cherokee Collection consists of diaries, accounts, and medicinal texts in Cherokee collected by Will West Long and Morgan Calhoun, accompanied by notes by Speck and John Witthoft. Among these are several diaries kept by Long (mostly 1904-1917), records of the Gadugi (a Cherokee mutual aid group), accounts, records of births and deaths at Big Cove, Cherokee-English vocabularies, and material collected on Cherokee botany collected by James Mooney in 1887. Several of the items contain information on Cherokee medicine, including formulae and curing charms.

Four Cherokee stories recorded by Charles Huff at Cherokee, North Carolina in June 1980. Three stories--"The Possum's Tail," "The Possum and the Wolves," and "Rabbit and the Bear"--given by Ollie Jumper. One unidentified story given by Goliath George.

Oral history interviews with 15 Cherokee speakers on their background and use of Cherokee, espcially their use of the Cherokee syllabary.

Field recordings made in North Carolina in 1958 of Cherokee sacred formulae. The material in this collection has been designated as culturally sensitive. Remote access and reproduction are restricted. Please consult a librarian for details.

Cherokee folkloric stories told by Lloyd Running Wolf Sequoyah and Lawyer Calhoun, 15 in English, 4 in English and Cherokee. Recorded by Raymond Fogelson in North Carolina in July and August of 1958.

Includes paradigms; suffix forms; prepronominal prefixes; texts.

The linguist Harvey Pitkin has worked on several of the indigenous languages of Northern California, with a particular interest in Wintu, Patwin, and Yuki. A student of A. L. Kroeber, Pitkin was a member of the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and later at Columbia University before his retirement in the late 1980s. The Pitkin Papers contain materials recorded or accumuluted by Harvey Pitkin during the course of his study of American Indian languages, including not only his own fieldnotes and research on Wintu and Yuki, but originals and copies of notes, notebooks, and slipfiles by A. L. Kroeber, A. M. Halpern, John P. Harrington, John Alden Mason, Paul Radin, Hans Uldall, Donald Ultan, T. T. Waterman, and others. These include important information on Atsugewi, Kwakiutl, Luiseno, Pomo, Wappo, Yahi, and Yana, and include some data on the consultants Ralph Moore (Yuki) and Ishi (Yahi).

Includes folkloric stories, conversation (concerning religion, sons in the military, letters from friends), and a variety of elicitations to test freedom of word order between two generations of speakers, classificatory verbs, word pairs with contrast of vowel length and stress, verb affixes and suffixes, and immediate and regular imperative verbs. Recorded at the Cherokee Indian Reservation, North Carolina from 1951-1952.

This collection pertains principally to the Cherokees of North Carolina and Oklahoma and to their language, ethnography, folklore, archeology, history, music, etc. Includes Indian studies and correspondence by Gillespie, notes on Indian dances and linguistics, bibliographies, publications of the Archaeological Society of Brigham Young University, and newspaper clippings. Also comprised of materials on: Apache, Calusa, Chippewa, Choctaw, Delaware, Eskimo, Fox, Iroquois, Karankawa, Kuchin, Louchens, Mattaponi, Muskogee, Navajo, Onondaga, Pueblo, Sauk, Seminole, Seneca, Shawnee, Sioux, Slave, Timucua, Tuscarora, Tutelo, and Wyandot. Contains: Gillespie, "A grammar of western dialect of Cherokee language of the Iroquoian family," 1949-1954 (131 pages); "Miscellaneous material on the Cherokee Indians and language"; "Miscellaneous items pertaining to the American Indian."

These papers include materials on the Onondaga, Tuscarora, Seneca, Cayuga, and Oneida Indians, collected during the years 1928-1930 under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies' Committee on Native American Languages. Included are field notes, grammars, dictionaries, studies of Handsome Lake religion, medical prescriptions, comparative linguistics, and correspondence with Franz Boas. Contains data on consultants, texts, translations, paradigms, grammatical studies, and lexical files.

This item contains Jefferson's comparative vocabulary, based on his collection of vocabularies taken on printed forms; a second comparative vocabulary; and John Sibley's vocabulary of the Caddo language. This document was damaged in transit from the White House to Monticello in 1809 (see letters of Jefferson to Peter S. Du Ponceau, November 7, 1817, and April 26, 1816.)

Beginning in the 1790s, the American Philosophical Society began to accumulate vocabularies and texts written in Native American languages, guided by Thomas Jefferson's idea of using comparative linguistics to reconstruct the histories of Indian peoples and discern their origins. The American Indian Vocabularies Collection was initially assembled by the Historical and Literary Committee of the APS for publication in 1816. They include information on seventeen North American languages and one each from the Caribbean and Central America, collected between 1784 and 1828. A number of individuals were invovled in recording the vocabularies, including Benjamin Hawkins, William Thornton, David Campbell, Daniel Smith, Constantine Volney, Constantine Rafinesque, William Vans Murray, John Heckewelder, Martin Duralde, Campanius Holm, and Jefferson himself. Most followed the standardized word set established by Jefferson.

This collections consists of texts in several Iroquoian languages (Cayuga, Cherokee, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, Tuscarora) recorded and played back to other speakers to test the mutual intelligibility of the languages for various speakers. The recordings comprise numerous texts in these languages, administered mutual intelligibility tests, stories, and conversations, all predominantly untranslated. Originally recorded on wire in the fall of 1950 at various locations in the United States and Canada. Later copied to sound tape reels. The native consultants involved in these recordings are as follows. The Cayuga language consultant was Jane Owl, recorded at Cattaraugus Indian Reservation (N.Y.) The Cherokee consultant was David Owl, recorded at Cattaraugus Indian Reservation (N.Y.) The Mohawk consultants were Ernest Benedict and Sadie Curlyhead, recorded at Saint Regis Mohawk Indian Reservation (N.Y.), and Ernest Benedict and Mr. & Mrs. Charles Benedict, recorded at Cornwall, Ontario. The Oneida consultants were Harry Antone, Betsy Antone, Rosa Antone, Billy Antone, and Mr. & Mrs. Chapman Schanandoah, recorded at the Onondaga Indian Reservation (N.Y.), and Albert Christian, recorded at Nedrow (N.Y.) The Onondaga consultants were Louis Lyons, recorded at the Cattaraugus Indian Reservation (N.Y.), and George Thomas, Jr., Percy Smoke, Thomas Lewis, Pat Homer, and Floyd Henhawk, recorded at the Onondaga Indian Reservation (N.Y.) The Seneca consultants were as follows: Annie Lyons, recorded at the Cattaraugus Indian Reservation (N.Y.); a Mr. & Mrs. Smith, recorded at the Oneida Nation of the Thames in southwestern Ontario; Richard Johnny John, Colline Johnny John, Amos Johnny John, Lena Snow, Kenneth Snow, Albert Jones, Hubert Cusick, Lynn Dowdy, Henry Redeye, Elver Jacobs, and Mr. & Mrs. Laurence Jimerson, recorded at the Allegany Indian Reservation (N.Y.); Jesse Cornplanter and Solon Skye, recorded at the Tonawanda Indian Reservation (N.Y.) The Tuscarora consultants were Nellie Gansworth and William Mt. Pleasant, recorded at the Tuscarora Indian Reservation (N.Y.)

Recordings of Cherokee, Naskapi, Penobscot, Sioux (Santee), and Ho-Chunk materials. The copies in the APS Library were made from discs recorded by Speck in the field in various places in the United States, Canada, and Labrador between 1935 and 1937.

A physician, natural historian, and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Smith Barton (1766-1815) was one of the central figures in Philadelphia's early national scientific establishment. Having received his medical training in European universities, Barton was appointed Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 1789, lecturing on botany, materia medica, natural history. A prolific author, he established his reputation as one of the nation's preeminent botanists through his botanical text book The Elements of Botany (1803), but his contribtions to zoology, ethnology, and medicine were equally noteworthy. Barton's monograph on the "fascinating faculty" of the rattlesnake and his efforts in historical linguistics (New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America, 1798) were widely read, and his Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal (1804-1809) was one of the nation's first medical journals and an important outlet for natural historical research. The Barton Papers offer a comprehensive view of the professional work of Benjamin Smith Barton from the time of his return to the United States in 1789 until his death. The collection is divided into five series: Correspondence, Subject Files, Bound Volumes, Graphic Materials, and Printing Plates. The collection includes a particularly valuable series of botanical, medical, and natural historical drawings collected by Barton for research, reference, and publication. Among the many artists represented are William Bartram, Frederick Pursh, Pierre Turpin, and Benjamin Henry Latrobe.

The William O. Bright papers consist particularly of extensive correspondence relating mostly to his later academic work, a number of field notebooks from North America and India, publications on and by Indigenous North Americans (especially Karuk and other Californian tribes) and from linguistic societies, his own research and publications, and extensive lexical slip files (especially on Karuk, Spanish borrowings, and copies of Daythal Kendall's Takelma and Kalapuyan files). Many audio recordings are also present, some of which are duplicates of those at the California Language Archive. In addition to the materials browsable through the finding aid, Bright's email correspondence and computer files can be accessed onsite at the APS. William Bright's career extended to a wide variety of linguistic work, including Native Californian languages and literatures, Native American place names, editorships of major linguistics journals, and writing systems of the world.

For many years referred to as the "Franz Boas Collection of American Indian Linguistics," this collection consists of a large body of linguistic and ethnographic material gathered together by Boas and many of his colleagues and students primarily from the 1890s to the 1940s. It contains the bulk of Boas's own fieldwork material, with the main exception of most of his Inuit and earliest Northwest Coast fieldwork. It contains the majority of the work sponsored by American Council of Learned Societies Committee on Native American Languages, which was directed by Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, Alfred Kroeber, and other academic linguists from 1927-1937. The collection, however, also contains related kinds of fieldwork and derived secondary materials created outside the auspices of this Committee, both earlier and later. The first deposit of the material arrivied in 1945. Subsequently, additional related materials were donated and added, as noted in the listings. Additionally, the documentary materials produced by some of the early projects (1945 to circa 1955) of the APS Phillips Fund for Native American Research were added to this collection. The collection has grown to over 80 linear feet of material representing at least 166 languages and dialects from the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The formats range from field notes and ethnographic texts to slip files, vocabularies, lexica, and grammars, and dozens of linguists and Native consultants are represented.

The Mary Rosamond Haas papers are extensive, including correspondence, research notes, field notes, texts, lexical slip files, audio recordings, photographs, reprints and more, covering more than 100 languages of North America and Southeast Asia. Of particular value are notes and audio recordings from fieldwork from the 1930s on Ditidaht, Tunica, Natchez and Muscogee, work toward pedagogical materials for Thai, and groundbreaking comparative studies of several language families of North America.

Audio recordings, primarily linguistic field recordings of Native American languges, removed from the James M. Crawford papers. The bulk of the recordings are in three areas: Alabama songs, stories, and fiddle music; Cocopa folklore, autobiographical stories, songs, and elicited words and sentences; Yuchi autobiographical stories, conversations, and elicitied word lists. Other material includes: Cherokee conversations; Chickasaw word and phrases lists; readings from a Chontal-Spanish dictionary; a Diegueño text; words lists and discussion regarding the Mobilian trade language (Yama); intermixed Mobilian, Choctaw, and Koasati word lists; Mohave songs, with explanations; a Navajo elicitation session, with interview and conversation; elicited Shoshoni expressions; Tolowa songs, Yavapai word lists and texts; and Yuki words and expressions. The small amount of non-Native American material in the collection generally consists of unidentified conversations, readings of English and Russian texts, and recordings of baby talk.