As secretary to John Anstey, Loyalists' Claims Commissioner, Robert Woodruff offers a detailed record of the U.S. in the early national period from the unique vantage of an English loyalist. His journal (1785-1788) documents his trip through the Northeastern, mid-Atlantic, and Southeastern states (as far south as Georgia). In his travels, Woodruff references many colonial leaders, including George Washington (10/27/1986), Samuel Vaughan (11/2/1786), and Benjamin Franklin (11/4/1786). Notably, Woodruff dines in house where "Lord Cornwallis in December 1776 held a council of war whether he should cross the Delaware to attack General Washington" (10/30/1786), witnesses Franklin's reelection as President of the Pennsylvania state house (11/4/1786), and mentions the American Philosophical Society (5/8/1787).
 

The journal was printed in APS Proceedings 26 (1889):1. The Kentucky travels can be found in Reuben G. Thwaites' Early Western Travels, 1748-1846.

Michaux maintained travel journals during his excursions throughout North America between 1787-1796. These 10 volumes furnish accounts of Charleston (September 1787), Saint Augustine and the Bahamas (1787-88), the Savannah River (December 1788), and Kentucky shortly after statehood (1794-95). Notably, Michaux records at least one visit to David Rittenhouse and Thomas Jefferson (12/14/1793), and he makes a proposal to the American Philosophical Society to explore unknown regions beyond Missouri and Kentucky, which Jefferson, then Secretary of State, accepts (12/10/1792). French-reading researchers—the volumes are maintained entirely in French—ought to find that these volumes offer insights into Southern and Western exploration during the early national period.
 
The journal was printed in APS Proceedings 26 (1889):1. The Kentucky travels can be found in Reuben G. Thwaites' Early Western Travels, 1748-1846.

The John Slater Papers include abstracts from his diaries, available as loose, mostly typed pages, which traverse his consequential career in physics (1900-1975). These abstracts trace Slater's doctoral study at Harvard (1923) and postgraduate work at Cambridge University, appointment at MIT (1930), work at the Laboratory for Nuclear Science during World War II, and late-career at the University of Florida (after his retirement from MIT in 1966). His diaries contain notes about a trip to Japan (including Hiroshima and Nagasaki) in the fall 1953, meetings with defense contractors (such as Lockheed Martin) throughout the 1950s and 1960s, a sighting of Sputnik (7/20/1958), notes about an "NSF proposal for computing center" (4/30/1965), associations with and publications of APS members (7/7/1951, 7/7/1972), and Slater's own personal affairs, as excerpted in Selected Quotations. As such, these abstracts may interest scholars researching John Clark Slater's career in the field of physics, biochemistry, atomic history, and the history of science more broadly, as well as those considering World War II and military contractors in the Cold War period, the space race, the history of computing, and the institutional history of the American Philosophical Society.; To supplement these diary abstracts, researchers might choose to expand their exploration of the Slater Papers, which also contain 133 research notebooks (1944-1976), a lengthy series of folders, containing lectures, scientific notes, drafts of manuscripts and papers, correspondence from his collaboration with the Los Alamos Labs (1966-1970), and correspondence relating to the National Academy of Science.