Theoretical physicist Edward Uhler Condon documents three decades of his professional career through 35 volumes of appointment books and planners (1939-1971). Although his entries are necessarily sparse, these notebooks ought to interest scholars researching his professional activities in government, industry, and the academy (most especially his tenure at Princeton University). Condon recounts a range of professional engagements, including his teaching schedule, meetings, conferences, proposals, and book manuscript development. Notably, early entries register some religious practices (Jewish), such as meetings with rabbis (e.g. 4/16/1939, 10/19/1939), and mounting concerns related to World War II (beginning 3/16/1939). Later journals document his rising professional star, including a memo inviting him to participate in a meeting at Library of Congress (11/7/1949) and National Science Foundation (11/9/1957). Researchers interested in his career will find detailed records of his professional networks, including the names, contact details, and occasionally business cards of associates.
 

This collection contains at least 18 diaries spanning more than thirty-five years (1917-1954) of unusual diaries available as both loose pages (contained in 5 folders) and traditional notebooks (11 bound volumes). Maintained by crystallographer Rose Mooney-Slater, these records offer insights into her graduate education at Tulane University and the University of Chicago, Guggenheim Fellowship in Europe on the eve of World War II, and noteworthy career during the postwar period. Alongside many rich ancillary materials--such as a Friendship Book with numerous photographs from 1914-17--Mooney-Slater's diaries provide detailed information about her personal and professional life. Of particular note is a diary describing her aborted Guggenheim Fellowship in Holland at the outset of World War II, as excerpted in Selected Quotations (9/1/1939). With the outbreak of war, Mooney-Slater cuts short her fellowship and books passage back to the United States as others rush to leave Europe. Early diaries provide glimpses into her struggles to balance marriage with graduate education (1928-29) and later diaries document her wide-ranging professional travels during the postwar period, including trips to Europe in both 1951 and 1954. Unfortunately, many of these volumes are water-damaged, and it can be challenging to trace the chronology of materials in folders (particular items in the 1917-1952 folder). However, scholars willing to take the time to peruse these records will be richly rewarded with insights into twentieth-century science, the postwar research university, and the inner life of a remarkable female scientist.
 

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.