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.

The plant physiologist and historian Rodney H. True (1866-1940) divided his career relatively evenly between the Bureau of Plant Industry in United States Department of Agriculture and the Department of Botany and Morris Arboretum of the University of Pennsylvania. A specialist in the physiological function of mineral nutrients in plants, True was active in his later career in the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, the Pennsylvania Horticulture Society, and the Agricultural History Society. The True Papers consist of 6 linear feet of material relating primarily to the period of his career spent at the University of Pennsylvania. The collection contains roughly equal proportions of personal and professional correspondence, with a few diaries and research notebooks documenting his involvement with professional organizations and his interests in the history of his discipline.

Trained as an anthropologist under Frank Speck at the University of Pennsylvania, the ethnohistorian George Snyderman (1908- ) spent his career studying Seneca Indian religion, history, and culture. Snyderman edited the previously unpublished diaries of Halliday Jackson and John Phillips, Quaker missionaries to the Senecas in the late 18th and early 19th century. The Snyderman Papers includes a small volume of correspondence, along with manuscripts of works by Snyderman and colleagues, and copies of primary source materials pertaining to Seneca history. Of particular interest is his correspondence with anthropologists William N. Fenton, Merle Deardorff, and Frank Speck and with his Seneca consultant Clara Redeye and her daughter, Helen Harris, and photographs of the Allegany Senecas taken by Fenton and Speck.

An anthropologist and student of Native American cultures, Elisabeth Tooker devoted a long career, much of it as a professor at Temple University, to study of the culture and ethnohistory of the Haudenosaunee of New York State. The Tooker Papers is arranged in six series, and contain her correspondence, subject files, research notes, and both published and unpublished papers.

The American Eugenics Society Records is a small, selective collection offering information on various periods of the Society's development, including correspondence, membership records, and formal and informal material on its history. Of particular interest are the records of the Society's numerous committees, including the Executive Education, Population Genetics Research, Legislative, and local and state committees, and documentation of AES educational initiatives at state fairs and eugenic health exhibits and contests, especially the Fitter Family Contests. A scrapbook containing 97 images of Fitter Family and eugenic health exhibits, 1924-1926, provides valuable visual information of AES activities. One series in the collection relates to the numerous Princeton Conferences and to a genealogical survey of the populations of Shutesbury and Leverett, Massachusetts, and there is also material on the Population Council. The collection largely revolves around Frederick Osborn, the moving force in the Society for most of its later history, and it includes approximately 100 papers written or delivered by Osborn concerning eugenics, genetics, or population related topics. This note is currently under review for revision.

Alfred Irving ("Pete") Hallowell was an anthropologist best known for his studies of Ojibwa culture and world-view, and the innovative use of the Rorschach Test in his studies of the psychological interrelations of individuals and their culture. Early in his career, Hallowell worked as a social case worker for Family Service, and even after moving on to study anthropology in 1920 (M.A.), he carried with him an interest in ethnic and racial culture, developing additional interests in psychological testing. Except for the years 1944-1947, when he taught at Northwestern University, Hallowell spent his entire career at the University of Pennsylvania where he was professor of anthropology, professor of anthropological psychiatry in the Medical School, and curator of social anthropology at the University Museum. A cultural anthropologist, Hallowell's use of clinical psychological methods, especially Rorschach tests, was both innovative and controversial in his discipline. In his research, he concentrated on the Algonkian Indians, especially the Abenaki and Ojibwa Indians of Canada and Wisconsin (Berens River, Lake Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Lac du Flambeau, Wisconsin areas), and the Saulteaux of Berens River. The Alfred Irving Hallowell Papers (1892-1981) contain correspondence, subject files, manuscripts of published and unpublished works by Hallowell, papers by colleagues and students, research notes kept by Hallowell, with a special emphasis on social organization, personality, behavior, psychology, religion, and folklore. The collection of several hundred photographs provides rich graphic documentation of Hallowell's work among the Ojibwa and Abnaki Indians during the 1930s.

The Anthony F. C. Wallace Papers include correspondence to and from 20th century anthropologists, ethnologists, historians, linguists, and psychiatrists and provides a wealth of resources for the study of technological and social change, American Indians, culture and personality, revitalization movements, the anthropological study of religion, and the cultural and biological bases of behavior. In addition to Wallace's correspondence, research notes, and drafts, the collection includes Wallace family correspondence and photographs, as well as Wallace's writings from childhood through recent years.

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.

The James V. Neel Papers document nearly every phase of the career of one of the founders of human population genetics in the United States. Neel was particularly thorough and organized, and retained virtually all of his significant scientific correspondence, committee reports, minutes of meetings, and drafts of manuscripts. The collection also includes data collected during Neel's work among the Xavante, Yanomanö and other indigenous populations. In a career that spanned the period from the late work of Thomas Hunt Morgan and Charles B. Davenport to the contemporary world of molecular genetics and nucleic acids, Neel knew, worked with, and corresponded with many of the most influential 20th century practitioners of genetics. The collection begins in earnest in 1943, after Neel had decided to focus on human genetics. Neel's work with Drosophila and none of his Drosophila manuscripts are found in the collection.