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).

The collection of Charles Coleman Sellers (1903-1980) contains copious and detailed documentation of the art of Charles Willson Peale and his family. It consists of working files for Sellers's numerous publications, including his Portraits and Miniatures by Charles Willson Peale (1952); Charles Willson Peale with Patron and Populace (1969); C. W. Peale's Portraits of Washington (1951); Benjamin Franklin in Portraiture (1962); Mr. Peale's Museum (1980). Most files include photographs of the art work, notes on the piece, and correspondence with authorities or owners. Other series include one relating to the paintings of various other Peales, including Anna C., James, Mary Jane, Raphaelle, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Sarah Miriam, and a miscellaneous artist file, which includes the same type of material and information on many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists, including Thomas Eakins, George Healy, Robert Edge Pine, William Rush, Thomas Sully, Benjamin West, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, etc. There is a separate Sellers collection at Dickinson College, primarily personal in nature.

The Golla Papers include research notes, subject files, field notes, correspondence, copies of archival documents (photocopies; microfilm), audio recordings, 35 mm slides, and printed materials (including newspapers) on the Nuu-chah-nulth people of Vancouver Island, primarily the Hupacasath and Tseshaht.

Linguistic field recordings, recorded in Whatcom County, Washington, June - August 1974, with consultant Al Charles. Includes stories relating to Lummi history, descriptions of social customs, descriptions of museum artifacts, descriptions of how to prepare various kinds of traditional foods, and elicited sentences. Majority of material given in Lummi and later reviewed and translated.

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.

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.