The manuscript holdings of the American Philosophical Society have been variously acquired. Many of its oldest and most valuable documents were gifts or bequests from Society members or friends. Several of the Jefferson and Du Ponceau manuscripts came to the Library this way. Correspondence to the Society from members and other scientists regarding its meetings and research programs was preserved in the archives. A number of scholarly projects have assembled research materials and subsequently deposited them in the Library: the Darwin Papers collection and editorial program, the History of Genetics Project, and the Collection of Materials for American Linguistics, sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, are cases in point. Many Society members have left their professional papers to the Library; in other cases, the Library has solicited members and nonmembers for their correspondence and manuscripts. In addition to bequests by individuals, learned societies and professional organizations also have deposited their records at the Library. The archives of the Genetics Society of America, the History of Science Society, and the Society of American Naturalists, among others, are at the Library, and the papers of the Linguistics Society of America are presently being received. Finally, the Library has an active program of purchase acquisition, and has obtained numerous letters and manuscripts of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century scientists in this manner.

The anthropological and archeological collections have been obtained through a combination of the above means. Documents from the early American period, circa 1780 to 1850, have come to the Library mainly as the result of donations by members and friends, particularly Jefferson and DuPonceau. There is a large collection of materials on American Indian linguistics, archeology, and ethnography from this era. The linguistic papers of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Smith Barton, Peter S. DuPonceau, Albert Gallatin, and David Zeisberger offer a comprehensive portrait both of linguistic research in early America and of American views regarding the origin of the continent's aboriginal inhabitants. Similarly, the ethnographic and archeological studies of Jefferson, DuPonceau, and John Heckewelder are valuable and interesting for their observations upon Indian history and culture. The United States was the only center of Enlightenment culture where men trained in the tradition of Rousseau, Condorcet, and their followers were able to observe primitive men in nature first hand.

The nineteenth-century anthropological successors to Jefferson, DuPonceau, and Gallatin are represented in the manuscript holdings, although the quantity of material is not as rich as for the earlier period. The American School of Anthropology -- a school of thought which used morphology as the basis for distinguishing racial types and argued for a polygenetic theory of racial origins -- was centered in Philadelphia, and there is a considerable number of Samuel Morton's manuscripts and correspondence in the Library's collections. Later nineteenth-century evolutionary theory is represented by manuscripts or film copies of the papers of Daniel Garrison Brinton, Lewis Wenry Morgan, and John Wesley Powell. The impact of Darwinian evolutionary theory on ethnography and physical anthropology can be traced through the papers of Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley, Charles Lyell, and John Lubbock. The Library has a complete collection -- whether in manuscript, film, or photocopy form -- of the Darwin correspondence; there is a film of the Huxley papers at Imperial College, along with original Huxley correspondence, and there are collections of Lyell and Lubbock correspondence. The reception of Darwin in America is documented in the Louis Agassiz and Asa Gray papers.

For the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Franz Boas papers offer numerous research possibilities. The Boas collection is composed of his professional and family correspondence, notebooks, addresses, course listings, and anthropometric data. Altogether, there are over 150 boxes, or 50 linear feet, of material. The professional correspondence is indexed in Scholarly Resources' Guide to the Microfilm Collection of Franz Boas (Wilmington, 1972). However, a significant amount of correspondence was never included in that guide. Supporting documentation, such as material collected by Muriel Rukeyser in the 1940s and 1950s, has been added to the collection.

Boas played a central role in American academic anthropology from the early 1900s to his death in 1943. For this reason his work is extremely important for any historian who wishes to trace the development of modern American anthropology. Boas' career and writings offer important insights into the modern history of ideas of race and culture, and the institutional development and disciplinary coalescence of modern anthropology. His professional life also is a convenient focus for historians interested in chronicling the intellectual shift from evolutionary to historical and functionalist modes of ethnological analysis.

Boas' students include many of the best-known and important anthropologists in twentieth-century America. Among them are Alexander Goldenweiser, Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Melville Herskovits, Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Elsie Clews Parsons, Paul Radin, and Edward Sapir. The papers of Parsons, Speck, Sapir, and Radin are at the APS Library. The historian, through the use of these collections, can trace Boas' relations to and influence upon his students; he can also collect evidence on whether there really was a Boasian School and, if so, what its characteristics were. The Parsons and Boas papers are useful for elucidating funding patterns in American anthropology. All the collections illuminate different aspects of anthropology's disciplinary and intellectual history. Other important anthropological collections are those of J. Alden Mason, Alfred Hallowell, and William S. Willis.

The History of Genetics Project has been collecting and editing the papers of twentieth-century American geneticists from its offices at the Library. As of present date, its collection includes the papers of Charles Davenport, Ernst Caspari, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Herbert Spencer Jennings, Raymond Pearl, L.C. Dunn, Milislav Demerec, Albert F. Blakeslee, Hubert Dana Goodale, and others. The archives of the American Eugenics Society, the American Genetics Society, and the American Society of Human Genetics have also been placed on deposit. An understanding of the research in human genetics by Davenport, Caspari, Dobzhansky, Jennings, Pearl, Dunn, Ernst Mayr, and R.C. Lewontin is a sine qua non for any scholar interested in the modern analysis of race, racial development and intermixture, and the influence of genetic factors upon social behavior and culture. Historians of socio-biology will find the genetic collection unsurpassed for their subject area in the period from the 1920s to present. For scholars of eugenics and American hereditarian thought, the papers of Davenport and the American Eugenics Society are similarly important. Other research topics suggested by this rich collection include: the influence of genetic thought upon theory in the social sciences, particularly anthropology and psychology; the history of evolutionary theory in the twentieth century; and the comparative impact of the evolutionary synthesis upon different biological and social scientific disciplines.

The archeological papers at the APS are not as rich a resource as their counterparts in anthropology and genetics. There are some interesting sources, however, for nineteenth- and twentieth-century archeology. The correspondence of Benjamin Franklin Peale and Daniel Garrison Brinton is useful for tracing developments in American archeology during the second half of the nineteenth century. There is miscellaneous correspondence of John Evans for the same period, along with twentieth-century correspondence for Arthur Evans. Sylvanus Morley's field diaries are at the Library, as is Alfred Kidder's correspondence with Neil Merton Judd. The correspondence of Boas with F. W. Putnam, J. W. Fewkes, A. M. Totter, and others is a rich mine of information on late nineteenth- and twentieth-century American archeology. The J. Alden Mason and Frederica DeLaguna papers are also important sources for this period.

The most important collection in archeology is that of the papers of William Foxwell Albright, the great scholar of Biblical archeology and history. His work ranges from archeology and the ancient history of the Near East to religious studies and the interpretation of Jewish and Christian religious texts. At present, the Albright collection has not yet been organized.

Finally, there are the Leonard Carmichael and Henry Allen Moe collections. Carmichael was chairman of the Division of Anthropology and Psychology of the National Research Council, from 1941 to 1943. His papers contain considerable information on the wartime use of social science by the federal government. Moe held an administrative position with the Guggenheim Foundation from 1925 to 1963. His records are particularly useful for providing details of Guggenheim support of research in Latin American linguistics, ethnography, and archeology.

This is a summary view of the manuscript collections at the Library. More detailed information is given in the bibliography below.