A Sachem and Civil War adjutant to Ulysses Grant, Ely Samuel Parker was an important figure in the Seneca Indian nation during the first half of the nineteenth century. Trained as an engineer, Parker was deeply involved in the Senecas' land disputes with the Ogden Land Company and he played an important role in interpreting Seneca culture for a white audience, most notably as a consultant for Lewis Henry Morgan. Collected by Arthur C. Parker, the Ely Samuel Parker Papers include correspondence, manuscripts, and printed materials relating primarily to Seneca affairs, history, language, and culture, as well as politics, education, engineering, and the Civil War. Among Parker's correspondents were Henry Clay, Millard Fillmore, Henry M. Flagler, Lewis Henry Morgan, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Daniel Webster, and Asher Wright. Several letters relate to Parker's service as engineer of public buildings in Galena, Illinois, and to his Masonic activities. Among the noteworthy items in the collection are several essays on Seneca history and culture, a fragment of Parker's diary, 1847, and a significant quantity of material on the Seneca language assembled by Asher Wright.

An early settler and prominent citizen in the Moravian heartland near Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Timothy Horsfield was named justice of the peace when Northampton County was formed out of Bucks in 1752, and was one of those given responsibility for the defence of the local white and Christian Indian populations during the French and Indian War. The Horsfield Papers offer a window onto the tumultuous history of northeastern Pennsylvania during the 1750s and 1760s. Comprised largely of correspondence and related documents between Horsfield, William Parsons, and provincial and military authorities, the collection includes important information on the Native tribes' actions (previously described as "Indian assaults") in the region in 1756 and 1757 and the military and diplomatic response of settlers.

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.

An anthropologist, Pamela Wallace was the Head of Education at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History at the University of Oklahoma. The papers include correspondence, research, works by Wallace, audio recordings, color slides, photographs, and videos of Yuchi Indians.

Ernst Krackowizer (1821-1875), father-in-law to the anthropologist Franz Boas (APS 1903), was an Austrian born surgeon who fled Vienna to New York following his involvement as captain of the Academic Legion during the Revolution of 1848. Krackowizer was an active member of New York medical community, helping to found the German Dispensary and Hospital, later renamed Lenox Hill Hospital. During the Civil War, Krackowizer assisted the Union Army as a volunteer surgeon and inspector of military hospitals. Krackowizer is claimed to have been the first on whom the anesthetic effects of chloroform were tested in Vienna and the first to use a laryngoscope in the United States. This collection is comprised of the personal papers of Ernst Krackowizer including diplomas, certificates, correspondence, diaries, and photographs, which document his life and medical career. Krackowizer's experience in the Revolution of 1848 and subsequent flight from Vienna trough Germany to the United States is well detailed in his correspondence to his fiancée and later wife, Emilie Forster, and in his diaries, which make up a significant portion of this collection. Krackowizer firsthand description of the early use of chloroform and the laryngoscope are included, as well as materials documenting his involvement as a volunteer surgeon and hospital inspector during the Civil War. Additionally, the Krackowizer Papers contain material written by others reference the life and work of Ernst Krackowizer.

The most stellar member of a stellar family, Elisha Kent Kane was among the most popular American explorers of the mid-nineteenth century, a hero in the tragic mode. Born in Philadelphia in 1820, the son of John Kintzing Kane and Jane Duval Leiper, Kane studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania before earning a commission as a naval surgeon. While in the Navy, Kane embarked on the succession of voyages to exotic locales that became the basis for his extraordinary fame. In 1843, he attended Caleb Cushing's first diplomatic mission to China as ship's physician, and subsequently traveled to the Philippines and Western Africa. Distinguishing himself in the Mexican War, Kane's greatest fame came from two expeditions to the arctic, aiming to locate the lost explorer, Sir John Franklin and to explore for evidence of the open polar sea. Kane died in 1857 while attempting to organize a third arctic voyage. Part of the Kane Family Collection, the Papers of Elisha Kent Kane contain a mix of personal and family correspondence with correspondence relating to all of Kane's explorations. Intelligent, articulate and very much a romantic, Kane's letters are expressive and passionate. The collection provides fine documentation of youth, his relationship with the Spiritualist Margaret Fox, and of course his travels to China and off the coast of Africa in 1846. Kane's two expeditions to the arctic are particularly well documented, with correspondence, notes, logbooks, diaries, and sketches, as well as Kane's post-expedition notes, writings, and lectures recounting his experiences.

This collection includes correspondence, lectures, notebooks, reports, photographs, and maps. There is much in Russell's papers concerning the Department of Geography at L.S.U., as well as faculty and research concerns and other needs of the university.

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were explorers. This collection contains the manuscript journals kept by Lewis and Clark on their travels to the source of the Missouri River and across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. There are interlineations throughout by Nicholas Biddle, who published his narrative "History of the Expedition of Captains Lewis and Clark" (1814).

An archaeological anthropologist and linguist, John Alden Mason spent the majority of his career at the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. After receiving his undergraduate degree at Penn in 1907, Mason received a doctorate at Berkeley (1911) for his ethnographic work on the Salinan Indians of California, but his diverse interests in later years ran the gamut from Puerto Rican folklore to Piman languages and cultures (including Pima, Papago, Pima Bajo, Northern and Southern Tepehuan, and Tepecano), Mayan, Aztec, and Incan archaeology, and the languages of South American Indians. Mason was curator of the University Museum at Penn from 1926 until his retirement in 1958. The Mason Papers include both in-coming and outgoing correspondence, linguistic material, notes, and photographs relating to Mason's work in the southwestern U.S., northern Mexico, and South America. Centered on the years after Mason's return to Philadelphia in 1926, the collection covers all aspects of Mason's professional life, from reports on field work to answering casual questions referred to him through the University Museum to data and analyses on Piman and other languages. The collection also contains voluminous files relating to the Mason's editorship of the American Anthropologist (bulk: 1945-1948). Of special note are a series of class notes (1908-1910) kept by Mason for course work in ethnology, archaeology, and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania under Edward Sapir and Frank Speck.

Robert Cushman Murphy (1887-1973), one of the twentieth century's great ornithologists, was curator of mammals and birds at the Brooklyn Museum (1911-1917) and was curator of birds and later chairman of birds at the American Museum of Natural History (1917-1973). The world's foremost authority on sea birds, in 1936, he penned Oceanic Birds of South America, a two volume set. An ardent traveler and explorer, he kept copious notes of his travels, which he typed up, illustrated and had bound. The APS library owns forty-two bound journals. Murphy was made an APS member in 1946. A pioneer in the study of the ecology, a louse, fish, plant, lizard, an Antarctic inlet, spider, and two mountains have acquired his name. This collection contains diaries, journals, articles, addresses and observations of Murph;, generously illustrated with newspaper clippings, photographs, letters, sketches, maps, and charts.

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.

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.

Arthur J. Cain is an evolutionary biologist whose research interests have included genetics, natural selection, biogeography, and systematics. Based at Oxford University and, later, the University of Liverpool, much of Cain's research was field-based, focusing on terrestrial gatsropods. This collection contains correspondence, grant applications, reports, programs for scientific meetings, unpublished papers and lectures, research notes, charts, graphs, maps, and manuscript reviews of journal articles and books. The Cain Papers is divided into three series: I. Correspondence ; II. Subject Files ; and, III. Papers by Colleagues. Arrangement is alphabetical by folder title, and chronological within each folder.

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.

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.

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.

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.