This journal was kept while Shippen was a student of medicine in London under Dr. Colin McKenzie and Dr. William Hunter. Notable people mentioned are Dennys De Berdt, Mark Akenside, George Whitefield, John Fothergill, David Garrick, and Thomas Penn.

Twice a refugee from the revolutionary violence in the French colony of Saint Domingue, John Thomas Carré became head of the Clermont Seminary in Philadelphia from 1804-1825, a select boarding school for boys. Carré's diary from 1807-1809 provides a basic chronology of his life at the Clermont Seminary, with a few comments on his students and their families. The entries are typically very brief and are confined to a relatively limited range of topics, including the weather, Carré's poor health, his visitors, and correspondents. There is also a biographical memoir by his granddaughter, Ann Virginia Sanderson Farquhar.

This volume is a record of a schoolboy's life in Switzerland, with comments on his life in Passy with his grandfather, Benjamin Franklin.

The collection contains information on Fox family speculation in western lands, two manuscript maps from the 1790's and 1830's depicting the family's holdings in northwestern Pennsylvania, and a photograph album from the 1890's documenting Chestnutwold, the Fox estate adjacent to Andalusia. Chief correspondents are Samuel and George Fox.