This is an interesting and detailed journal of his trip to America and travels therein. Using Philadelphia as his base, Beck commented on the city's society and institutions, and mentions locals, including an interesting note on Titian R. Peale. Other areas visited included: Atlantic City, St. Louis, Colorado, Utah, California and New York, where he visited the Bausch & Lomb Optical Company and Washington D.C., where he met, and described, artist Henry Ulke. The volume is filled with memorabilia: advertisements, photographs, playbills, menus, original pencil and watercolor sketches, some of machinery.

Dalton Dorr (1846-1901) was the curator, secretary and director of the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia, the forerunner of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, from 1880-1899. A journal, written in 1897, copied from his notes and from memory, of travels in Greenland (1869), the Indian Territory, Colorado and the Pacific coast (1872-73); Paris, England, Scotland, and Ireland (1882-85), with some sketches. He took the Greenland cruise with Isaac I. Hayes in 1869, which was described by Hayes in his "Land of Desolation" (New York: Harper, 1872). See also, a companion volume of albumen prints taken by William Bradford and other members of "Under the midnight sun: a pleasure cruise in Greenland" in the summer of 1869.