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Natchez Indians
"The Natchez," 1840. 136 pp.

In the hand of an unknown author, this is a history of the Natchez Indians written at Natchez in November, 1840.

View a pdf transcript of the manuscript, edited by Ed Leigh.

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Nautilus (Submarine)
Collection, 1931. 0.25 linear feet.

In 1931, the Nautilus, an O-12 class submarine, was fitted out to undertake an expedition to gather meteorological and oceanographical information while venturing beneath polar ice floes to the north pole. Although the crew did gather some useful information, the expedition was fated to suffer delays, accidents, and perhaps even sabotage. Although mechanical problems ruined any hope of reaching the pole, by late August, 1931, the Nautilus had maneuvered to the edge of the Arctic ice cap and was able to dive beneath a few floes. On its return, however, damage from storms and engine failure led the crew to scuttle the ship a few miles off the coast of Bergen, Norway.

The Nautilus Collection is comprised of approximately 60 photographs, plus assorted newspaper clippings, postcards, and a few other miscellaneous items. The photographs document the voyage of the Nautilus from Camden, New Jersey, to the Brooklyn Naval Yard, and New London, Connecticut, across the Atlantic to the Arctic regions. The collection includes formal and informal photographs of the submarine, its interior, and ice floes, along with portraits of many of the ship's officers.

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Neagle, John (1796-1865)
Portrait painter
Notebooks, 1825-1850. 5 vols.

One of the better known portrait painters in Philadelphia during the first half of the nineteenth century, John Neagle was the husband of Thomas Sully's niece, Mary C. Sully.

The Neagle Papers is a small assemblage of personal correspondence, documents, and notes assembled by Neagle during his career. The letters are primarily of a personal nature, but along with the five bound volumes, offer insight into Neagle's study of painting and the techniques he employed. Included among the bound volumes are recipes for varnish, megellup, and drying oils and notes on watercolor painting.

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Neel, James V. (James Van Gundia), 1915-2000
Papers, ca.1939-1999. ca.100 lin. feet

Papers of James V. Neel, pioneering human population genetecist and professor in the Department of Human Genetics, University of Michigan Medical School. Curt Stern's first graduate student at the University of Rochester, and a post-doctoral student under Theodosius Dobzhansky, Neel began his career as a Drosophila geneticist, but after taking his first professional appointment as an assistant professor at Dartmouth, decided to alter his course into human genetics. Reasoning that he needed a solid medical education to complement his genetical training, he returned to Rochester in 1942 to study for an MD.

Like all medical students during the Second World War, Neel was inducted into military service. Rochester was the base for studies in radiation biology associated with the Manhattan Project, and at the end of the war, with Neel still in the military, a chance friendship with the adjutant to the head of the project resulted in Neel's appointment to help organize a genetical survey of the atomic bomb survivors. In 1946-1947, Neel lived in Hiroshima, organizing this project, part of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Committee (ABCC), and he maintained a close connection to the study until his death. His work in Japan mushroomed, too, into a series of related projects into the biology and genetics of consanguinity, among other topics.

While at Rochester, Neel also began to establish a name for himself in other areas of human genetics. As a resident at Rochester's Strong Memorial Hospital, Neel encountered a case of thalassemia, and reading the medical literature, he became convinced that it was a genetic recessive disease. Over a span of five years, he delineated the genetic basis of haemoglobin diseases - first thalassemia, then sickle cell disease - in the process, helping to precipitate the revolution in biochemical genetics of the 1950s through 1970s. Neel's work also encompassed the evolutionary implications for these diseases, implanting balanced polymorphism and heterozygote advantage into the vocabularies of evolutionary biologists. Neel's studies of thalassemia and sickle cell disease were recognized with the receipt of the Lasker Award in 1955.

In the late 1950s, Neel entered into a third major set of projects, turning to extensive field studies in population genetics. Recognizing that the number of human populations isolated from modern medicines and modern technology was rapidly dwindling, Neel embarked on an ambitious genetic survey of the comparatively "primitive" Xavante of Brazil and, later, the Yanomamo of the Brazilian-Venezuelan borderlands. These studies, carried out over the course of more than a decade, and involving even longer spans of laboratory work, constitute the first and most comprehensive studies of human population and breeding structure and genetic diseases among "primitive" peoples. Dr. Neel died in February, 2000.

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Neuberg, Carl (1877-1956)
Biochemist
Papers, ca.1880-1956. (10.75 lin. ft.).

A pioneer biochemist, Carl Neuberg's spent over thirty years of his productive career as a professor at the University of Berlin (1903-1937) and as Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes of Biochemistry and Experimental Therapy. His varied research interests resulted in important contributions to the understanding of fermentation processes, solubility and transport phenomena in cells, the chemistry of carbohydrates, sugars, enzymes, and amino acids, and photochemistry. Neuberg was forced out of his position after the Nazi rise to power, and taking refuge in the United States. For the last several years of his life, he worked at New York University.

The Neuberg collection consists of correspondence, lab notebooks, documents, photographs, and reprints, nearly all dating from after Neuberg's departure from Germany in 1940. The correspondence documents Neuberg's late-career work and the contacts he developed with American chemical manufacturers and industries involved in fermentation, as well as the burgeoning post-war relationship between scientific research and the federal dollar. Files for the American Cancer Society, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, and the U.S. Public Health Service in particular contain useful information for study of the politics and mechanics of government grants.

Also described in Lily Kay, Molecules, Cells, and Life

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Nevins, Pim (1756-1833)
Quaker merchant and woollen manufacturer
Journal, 1802-1803. 1 vol. (227 pp.).

A merchant and member of the Society of Friends, Pim Nevins (1756-1833) lived most of his life in the English midlands. Recorded in Pigot's Directory of 1834 as a member of the gentry resident in Hunslet Lane, Leeds, Nevins was a woollen cloth manufacturer, finisher, and merchant whose operations were located at Larchfield Mill, near Huddersfield.

During a voyage to visit Friends' meetings in the United States in 1802-1803, Pim Nevins kept a journal to record his thoughts and experiences. In presenting a copy of his diary to his children, he wrote: "some parts [of the diary] wch. being by way of memorandum to assist my memory will of course be no ways interesting to you; other parts being fill'd with the effusions of my own thoughts, will I fear be dry to you unless your minds should in some measure be dip'd into the like state with mine when influencing my pen; some other parts may entertain you." The journal includes a mixture of description of the cities, towns and landscape through which Nevins passed and accounts of his visits with Friends in New York city, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore, Washington, Alexandria, Bethlehem, Pa., Easton, Pa., the Pocono Mountains, northern New Jersey, New Brunswick, N.J., and Trenton, N.J. It also includes a delicate watercolor drawing of the Delaware Water Gap.

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New England
Journal, 1895-1896. 1 vol. (48 pp.).

This journal is by an unknown author. It records a vacation spent on Cape Cod in 1895 and in Nova Scotia the following year.

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New Jersey. General Assembly
Acts, 1727, 1746, 1747. 3 items.

Acts for issuing bills of credit, 1727; for victualling the forces on an expedition to Canada, 1746; and for further victualling forces lately raised in New Jersey on an expedition to Canada, 1747.

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New Sweden
Records in the archives at Stockholm, 1640-1655. 1 vol., 29 items. In Swedish, German, and French.

The New Sweden Company was founded as a joint stock enterprise in 1637 including Swedish, Dutch, and German investors seeking to trade in American furs and tobacco. Centered at Fort Christina, near present day Wilmington, Delaware, the colony expanded up both sides of Delaware Bay and the Delaware Reiver to present day Philadelphia, but capitulated to the Dutch in 1655.

This volume contains selected transcripts in Swedish and German of documents in Swedish archives relating to the settling and governance of the colony of New Sweden in Delaware and Pennsylvania, made at the expense of Jonathan Russel, United States minister to Sweden, 1820. The documents have all been translated into French, and were printed in Hazard's Register of Pennsylvania 4 (1829): 177 through 5 (1830): 219. Bound in at the end of the volume is Ch. 5 of Per Lindeström, "Description de la nouvelle Suède et des Indes Occidentales, 1691".

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New York (City). Department of Health
Poliomyelitis Records, 1916. 28.5 lin. ft.

The Board of Health in New York City joined with scientists from the Rockefeller Institute to study the poliomyelitis epidemic that struck the city during the summer of 1916. Using a small army of nurses and public health professionals, they canvassed the city for all reported cases of the disease, assessed conditions that might contribute to its spread, and enforced quarantine.

The records collected by the Department of Health in New York City during the poliomyelitis epidemic of 1916 were gathered by nurses who canvassed every neighborhood in the city to determine which children were stricken, the conditions that may have contributed to the disease, and whether a quarantine was in force.

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Newhouse, Seth (1842?-1921)
Mohawk Cosmogony of De-ka-na-wi-da's government, 1885. 1 vol. (302 pp.). Photocopy.

From the original formerly in possession of Ray Fadden of St. Regis Mohawk Reservation, Hogansburg, N.Y. Described by William N. Fenton, "Seth Newhouse's Traditional History and Constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy," APS Proc. 93 (1949): 141.

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Newman, John
Physician of Salisbury, N.C. APS 1797
A short account of the situation, soil, production &c. of the State of Tennessee, 1797. 1 vol. (31 pp.).

Dated 19 January 1797; read at a meeting of APS, 17 February 1797. Bound in is William Dunbar, Plan of a settlement near the Natches, noted as received from C. Ross, August 1803.

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Newton, Sir Isaac (1642-1727)
Mathematician
Notes on ancient history and mythology, n.d. 14 pp.

These are both rough reading notes and finished essays written primarily in Latin, but also in English, Greek, and Hebrew. There are sections on the Egyptians and Tyrrhenians, on history before the great flood, and a genealogical table relating to Noah. These manuscripts were once part of the Portsmouth Papers, sold at auction in 1936.

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North American Indian Languages
Collections

In addition to many manuscripts entered elsewhere in this Guide, the Library has dictionaries and vocabularies and other materials relating to North American Indian languages, which are indexed in detail in John Freeman 1966, A Guide to Manuscripts Relating to the American Indian in the Library of the American Philosophical Society and its supplement published in 1982 by Daythal Kendall.

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North American Land Company
Miscellaneous documents, 1768-1843. 1 vol. (80 pp.). & 56 items.

Ledger, 1795-1805, showing accounts with:

• Tench Coxe
• Thomas Fitzsimons
• William Temple Franklin
• Jared Ingersoll
• Pierre L'Enfant
• Robert Morris
• Frederick A. Muhlenberg
• John Nicholson
• Thomas Ruston
• Benjamin Shoemaker
• John Vaughan
• James Wilson

Also many deeds and other documents to which Robert Morris was a party. The volume is indexed.

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Nuttall, Thomas (1786-1859)
Naturalist. APS 1817
Diary, 1810. Photostat. (121 pp.).

Journal of a trip from Philadelphia by stage to Pittsburgh, then afoot through Franklin, LeBoeuf, and Erie to the Huron River; thence by boat to Detroit, where he remained 26-29 July, when he set out by canoe for Michilimackinac. Descriptions of Detroit, plants, animals, springs, Indian mounds; notes on goitre. Edited by Jeanette Graustein and published in Chronica Botanica 14, 1-2 (1950-1951).

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