In his detailed journal of a trip to America in the late-nineteenth century (1880), English Quaker Richard Beck offers comments on Philadelphia society and its institutions, as well as a record of his travels around America, particularly by rail. Along the way, he crosses paths with naturalist Titian Peale and artist Henry Ulke. This volume is noteworthy in two regards. First, it contains a wealth of memorabilia, including advertisements, photographs, playbills, menus, as well as Beck's own original pencil and watercolor sketches. Second, it features thoughtful and often comparative assessments of the people and places he visits. In fact, no detail can escape Beck's attentive eye. Alongside descriptions of Colorado rock formations (4/30/1880), Yosemite redwoods (6/2/1880) and the development of Salt Lake City (5/15/1880), Beck intersperses comments on American hairstyles (2/27/1880), eyeglasses (3/2/1880), libraries (4/20/1880), and that great American pastime, baseball (7/8/1880). This volume may interest scholars of postbellum material culture, late-nineteenth century Philadelphia, and the American West.
 

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.