Robert Cushman Murphy was not only one of the twentieth century's great ornithologists, but also one of his field's most-ranging travelers. Visiting every continent—with the notable exclusion of Africa and the notable inclusion of Antarctica—Murphy's diaries and journals, which number at least 36 volumes, offer nearly six decades (1912-1971) of detailed observations of Australia, Asia, Europe, and North and South America. Those volumes include glimpses of the Florida everglades in the early-twentieth century ("Florida Fisheries, 1919"), post-war London ("European Trip, May - August 1950"), postcolonial India ("Around the World: A Circumnavigation"), and Antarctica in the early-1960s ("Operation Deep Freeze: Antarctic Cruise, 1960"). Although Murphy proves most adept in his observations of wild life, he also captures a sense of the people and places he encounters through the generous inclusion of ephemera such as newspaper clippings, photographs, postcards, programs, and sketches. In fact, many of his later journals more closely resemble scrapbooks than diaries. Perhaps most notably, Murphy maintains a journal related to one of the last whaling voyages by sailboat in the Atlantic, "The Way of the Sperm Whaler" (June 1912-1913). In addition to typed and handwritten entries feature with detailed technical data on processing whales at sea, Murphy includes dozens of original photos, and a wealth of ephemera, including even a piece of sperm whale skin. (The American Philosophical Society also possesses the signed publication of the journal, A Dead Whale or a Stove Boat, 1967.) Read in tandem with the Grace E. Barstow Murphy diaries (Mss.B.M957.g), researchers will discover a textured record of mid-century conservation.
 

The Elisha Kent Kane Papers and Logbooks include at least 50 heterogeneous notebooks, journals, and logs that may be loosely termed diaries and clustered into four main categories: Kane's arctic expeditions (containing six notebooks); his world travel (eight notebooks); his education, training, and medical practice (24 notebooks); and the various ship logs contained in the Kane Ship Log collection (12 notebooks). Although some of these records are difficult to interpret in isolation, when read together in these suggestive clusters, they will richly reward scholars interested in trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific travel, antebellum medicine, colonialism, and ethnography. Reference F. A. Parker's "Log of the U.S. Frigate Brandywine" (Kane Logbooks, No.7) and Samuel L. Breeze's "Journal of the U.S. Sloop of War Albany" (Kane Logbooks, No.8) for detailed illustrations of antebellum Rio de Janeiro, Macao, Hong Kong, Honolulu, Valparaiso, Veracruz, and the Yucatan.
 

The travel journals of Harvard professor, curator, and evolutionary biologist George Gaylord Simpson ought to be near the top research lists of scholars investigating twentieth-century history, travel, conservation, anthropology, and paleontology. Available in seven boxes of handwritten journals, typed pages, carbon copies, and countless ephemera, Simpson's travel writings provide textured insights into his life, research, intellectual, philosophical, and political positions. Over the course of six decades of journaling (1924-1984), Simpson records at least 36 distinct expeditions, traveling to every continent and documenting discoveries in extraordinary detail and literary style. (Consider the locations identified with this note representative rather than comprehensive of his diverse travels.) Noteworthy journals include: Depression-era trips to Patagonia (1931, 1934), an extended tour of Venezuela in the late-1930s (1938-39), trips to Brazil and the Amazon basin (1954-56, 1983-84), a tour to Spain under Franco (1960), expeditions in North Africa and the Middle East just before the Six Day War (1967), visits to Australia (1951, 1968), Fiji (1968), Indonesia (1975), Papua New Guinea (1976), trips to the Galapagos (1970, 1974), expeditions to the Arctic (1974) and Antarctica (1971-73), a trip to Soviet Union during the Cold War (1977), and a tour of China after its economic reforms (1980).; In his travels, Simpson's mastery of detail is matched only by his curiosity and literary flourish. For example, during his 1938-39 Venezuela tour, he discusses everything from population density (4/25/1939) and the work of Catholic missionaries with indigenous populations (1/15/1939) to the sweet coffee in Barquisimeto (9/21/1938) and his method for killing an opossum without damaging its skin (10/6/1938). At times, his reflections blur the boundaries of prose and poetry. In a collection of reminders from his time in Los Robles, he lists: "The noise they make to shoo animals--This can't be written even approximately, something like the clearing of a throat long and viciously. The sound of rain falling on canvas, on bushes, everywhere, the roar of flooding gullies, and slip and thud of landslides. The sound of pigs slashing and shearing by night outside the kitchen. The smell of fresh, heavily roasted coffee being ground…Hillsides brilliant yellow and pale green with mecutera" (12/19/1938). Researchers may anticipate discovering such redolent entries scattered throughout Simpson's journals, as suggested by Selected Quotations. Although items are not individually cataloged, scholars may choose to begin to mine this rich collection using Anne Roe Simpson's "Note on travel diaries."
 

Russian-readers will be richly rewarded, given that Dobzhansky modulates entries between Russian and English. In some entries, he self-consciously reflects on the language he opts to use. For example, on February 16, 1952, he imagines his child (Sophie) as the audience of his entries: "I am switching to English, in order that my child would find it easier to accompany her father's experiences, is she wants to accompany them."
 
Even in diaries recorded predominantly in Russian, Dobzhansky encloses numerous ephemera—business cards, letters, hand-drawn sketches, recognitions/awards, medical test results, newspaper clippings, and more—accessible to English-speakers. In many of his diaries from the 1950s and 1960s, typed letters provide some insights into his thoughts on health, mortality, and faith (e.g. 2/16/1952, 5/16/1957, 7/16/1968, 10/13/1969)
 
(strained) relations with his children (e.g. 5/16/1957, 10/28/1968, 12/31/1968)
 
and career (3/25/1970
 
6/30/1970, 1/25/1975).
 
Dobzhansky traveled widely, providing particularly detailed accounts of South America and the American West. While English entries largely abstains from discussing politics, he does occasionally discuss Brazilian politics (e.g. 9/7/1954, 10/16/1955), and the election of Richard Nixon, about whom he is consistently critical (e.g. 11/6/1970, 12/31/1973, 8/8/1974).
 
Throughout his four decades of journal-writing, Dobzhansky expresses one consistent concern: his desire to continue doing useful work. Marking his final birthday, he writes, "So, I have lived ¾ of a century. Today begins the last quarter, or rather past thereof…Oh God, give me power to finish my life serving you by doing my life work in science! In 75 years I have not yet exhausted either my interest or, I hope, my ability" (1/25/1975).

The Dobzhansky Papers feature 47 volumes spanning 1934-1975. (The boxes in which they are enclosed also include other notebooks and workbooks without sequential entries.) These diaries ought to interest researchers studying genetics and evolutionary biology, early-twentieth-century travel expeditions (particularly into the Amazon), the creationist debate (especially in textbooks and public schools), the post-war university (Columbia University, in particular), South American politics, and Dobzhansky's biography.
 
Russian-readers will be richly rewarded, given that Dobzhansky modulates entries between Russian and English. In some entries, he self-consciously reflects on the language he opts to use. For example, on February 16, 1952, he imagines his child (Sophie) as the audience of his entries: "I am switching to English, in order that my child would find it easier to accompany her father's experiences, is she wants to accompany them."
 
Even in diaries recorded predominantly in Russian, Dobzhansky encloses numerous ephemera—business cards, letters, hand-drawn sketches, recognitions/awards, medical test results, newspaper clippings, and more—accessible to English-speakers. In many of his diaries from the 1950s and 1960s, typed letters provide some insights into his thoughts on health, mortality, and faith (e.g. 2/16/1952, 5/16/1957, 7/16/1968, 10/13/1969)
 
(strained) relations with his children (e.g. 5/16/1957, 10/28/1968, 12/31/1968)
 
and career (3/25/1970
 
6/30/1970, 1/25/1975).
 
Dobzhansky traveled widely, providing particularly detailed accounts of South America and the American West. While English entries largely abstains from discussing politics, he does occasionally discuss Brazilian politics (e.g. 9/7/1954, 10/16/1955), and the election of Richard Nixon, about whom he is consistently critical (e.g. 11/6/1970, 12/31/1973, 8/8/1974).
 
Throughout his four decades of journal-writing, Dobzhansky expresses one consistent concern: his desire to continue doing useful work. Marking his final birthday, he writes, "So, I have lived ¾ of a century. Today begins the last quarter, or rather past thereof…Oh God, give me power to finish my life serving you by doing my life work in science! In 75 years I have not yet exhausted either my interest or, I hope, my ability" (1/25/1975).

The Heiser diaries are without peer when it comes to their scope--spanning the first seven decades of the twentieth-century--global reach, and detail. Scholars exploring the history of medicine might gravitate towards entries related to his public health work in the Philippines (1908-1916). Researchers interested in the history of zionism will be richly rewarded by volumes from 1922 and 1926--an excerpt from Heiser's July 1922 journey to Palestine is excerpted in Selected Quotations. And those interested in colonial India will discover a numerous reflections on Gandhi and 1920s non-violent resistance movements (also excerpted in Selected Quotations).
 
Perhaps most surprising are Heiser's detailed accounts of European travel between the 1920s and 1930s, during which he expresses some sympathy for nationalist movements. Traveling war-torn Italy, he remarked on there "appears to be unanimous agreement among natives and foreigners" that the new prime minister, Benito Mussolini, "has accomplished extraordinary results and that he is honest and genuinely patriotic" (11/19/1923). Several years later, he documents the nation's progress in developing infrastructure and improving services. He concludes his 4/29/1926 entry with an ominous justification for fascism: "Democracy gradually became so inefficient that all came to a standstill and a dictator was able to start the machinery on an effective basis."
 
Heiser traveled widely during the decade preceding World War II. In the late-1930s, he returned to Italy and decries the ubiquitous military presence, government propaganda, and oppressive taxation. And yet, he ends his entry with a section entitled "The Other Side." Heiser writes: "A whole new social order has been created. Instead of people finding fault with what government fails in, the press and government propaganda constantly drive into their ears what government is doing for the people. (In the end will this not produce more peace of mind and happiness than our democratic way of emphasizing fault-finding)" (4/25/1937).
 
On the topic of promoting public happiness, Heiser draws a similar conclusion during a contemporaneous visit to Germany. While he decries the Nazi government's "censorship, prohibitions and [intrusion into] one's private affairs," he adds: "And yet one begins to wonder whether there is not much to be said in favor of the good type of dictatorships, in promoting human happiness. In democracies people are [annoyed] to say or think little of the good things government does for them and to place main emphasis upon petty fault finding" (6/3/1937). Finally, just one year prior to the outbreak of World War II, Heiser pens perhaps his most generous account of dictatorships. That account, "Further Impressions Dictatorships," is excerpted in Selected Quotations.

By any measure, public health leader Victor George Heiser lived a long, productive, and vigorous life. His 86 diaries (1890-1972) predate the Spanish-American War and post-date U.S. escalation in Vietnam, while his career in public health put him in contact with politicians, diplomats, ambassadors, and government officials across the globe. An astute political observer, Heiser offers rich, on-the-ground insights into twentieth-century history as it unfolded, from the rise of Gandhi to the fall of Hitler. His 1920s and 1930s entries also offer candid explanations of and justifications for dictatorship. The Heiser diaries may interest a wide range of scholars, including those researching the history of science, American public health policy in the Philippines, the history of Zionism and Israeli statehood, colonialism in Asia (most especially India), and Europe between World War I and World War II.
 
The Heiser diaries are without peer when it comes to their scope--spanning the first seven decades of the twentieth-century--global reach, and detail. Scholars exploring the history of medicine might gravitate towards entries related to his public health work in the Philippines (1908-1916). Researchers interested in the history of zionism will be richly rewarded by volumes from 1922 and 1926--an excerpt from Heiser's July 1922 journey to Palestine is excerpted in Selected Quotations. And those interested in colonial India will discover a numerous reflections on Gandhi and 1920s non-violent resistance movements (also excerpted in Selected Quotations).
 
Perhaps most surprising are Heiser's detailed accounts of European travel between the 1920s and 1930s, during which he expresses some sympathy for nationalist movements. Traveling war-torn Italy, he remarked on there "appears to be unanimous agreement among natives and foreigners" that the new prime minister, Benito Mussolini, "has accomplished extraordinary results and that he is honest and genuinely patriotic" (11/19/1923). Several years later, he documents the nation's progress in developing infrastructure and improving services. He concludes his 4/29/1926 entry with an ominous justification for fascism: "Democracy gradually became so inefficient that all came to a standstill and a dictator was able to start the machinery on an effective basis."
 
Heiser traveled widely during the decade preceding World War II. In the late-1930s, he returned to Italy and decries the ubiquitous military presence, government propaganda, and oppressive taxation. And yet, he ends his entry with a section entitled "The Other Side." Heiser writes: "A whole new social order has been created. Instead of people finding fault with what government fails in, the press and government propaganda constantly drive into their ears what government is doing for the people. (In the end will this not produce more peace of mind and happiness than our democratic way of emphasizing fault-finding)" (4/25/1937).
 
On the topic of promoting public happiness, Heiser draws a similar conclusion during a contemporaneous visit to Germany. While he decries the Nazi government's "censorship, prohibitions and [intrusion into] one's private affairs," he adds: "And yet one begins to wonder whether there is not much to be said in favor of the good type of dictatorships, in promoting human happiness. In democracies people are [annoyed] to say or think little of the good things government does for them and to place main emphasis upon petty fault finding" (6/3/1937). Finally, just one year prior to the outbreak of World War II, Heiser pens perhaps his most generous account of dictatorships. That account, "Further Impressions Dictatorships," is excerpted in Selected Quotations.