Vaccinium ovatum (Evergreen Huckleberry), specimen collected by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in 1806.  In 1805 and 1806, Thomas Jefferson gave the American Philosophical Society herbarium sheets collected by Lewis and Clark during their 1804-1806 expedition. This specimen was collected at Fort Clatsop, Clatsop Co., Oregon.  All APS-owned Lewis and Clark specimens are currently on deposit at the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia.

Altazimuth Theodolite, 1700-1750, made by Thomas Heath.  The family of William Penn brought this theodolite, used for taking bearings in land surveys, to the American colonies. It was donated to the APS by early American surgeon and APS member Dr. Philip Syng Physick, whose grandfather had been in charge of the Penn estates during the Revolution.

Bust of Marquis de Condorcet, 1785, by Jean-Antoine Houdon.  During the 1780s, French mathematician and social reformer Nicholas de Condorcet (Marquis de Condorcet) was one of “les Américains,” a group of progressive aristocrats who supported the American Revolution and believed the United States could be a model for France.

Portrait of Thomas Jefferson, begun 1821, finished 1830, by Thomas Sully. This painting is the original study that Sully did for his commissioned portrait of Jefferson for the United States Military Academy.  Jefferson’s protégé William Short obtained the canvas and in 1830 donated it to the APS.

The Leon and Joanne V.C. Knopoff Library Resident Research Fellowship was endowed by Dr. and Mrs. Knopoff to support Library Fellows working on-site in the Society’s history of science collections, with preference for the physical sciences, including mathematics. Dr. Knopoff was Professor Emeritus of Physics and Geophysics at the University of California, Los Angeles.

"Although I had completed 18 months of field stay and written up my results, there was an important piece of research that occurred to me in the midst of turning my dissertation into a book manuscript.  The APS Franklin Grant provided me just the resources I needed to return to Pakistan to do additional research.  My book has benefited enormously from this rare opportunity."  Naveeda Khan's manuscript is titled The Promise of Pakistan: Locating Muslim Aspiration, Skepticism and the Ordinary.  Her central claims are that, contrary to standing scholarship, Pakistan had a founding vision of inaugurating Islamic modernity.  Her book attempts to draw out the contours of this aspiration, suggesting how the violence of skepticism and an enduring commitment to ordinary life also arise from this founding desire.  Dr. Khan is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.  (Franklin Grant)

"The Franklin Research Grant was crucial in making my research trip to Belgium possible.  Without it, I would never have had the opportunity to expand my research on the mulatto children, and to finish an article (Interracial Unions, Mixed Identities: Mulatto Children in the Belgian Congo, 1890-1960) that is currently being considered for publication."   Dr. Tshimanga-Kashama, a member of the history department at the University of Nevada, Reno, focuses his research on a significant but relatively unstudied aspect of colonial history, that of Afro-European children in the Belgian Congo and their impact on discourses of race, identity, gender, and colonialism.  (Franklin Grant)

"The APS/British Academy grant to conduct research in London was tremendously helpful.  I was able to obtain rare and difficult-to-find materials from the Royal Asiatic Society library's collection of Malay materials, and I had a productive summer reading in the East India Company archives at the British Library.  This grant will have a significant impact on the book I'm currently writing."  Su Fang Ng's book, Global Renaissance: Early Modern Empire and Classicism from the British Isles to the Malay Archipelago, examines how Greco-Roman models of empire became part of native histories of early modern island kingdoms in the far west and the far east--the British Isles and island Southeast Asia--and in turn, how these claims to classicism shaped English relations with Southeast Asians in the early modern East Indies spice trade.  Dr. Ng is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. (Franklin Grant)

“The Franklin Research Grant has enabled us to use sophisticated, computer-assisted methods to reconstruct most of the missing parts of this significant human fossil from Hofmeyr. This new information will enable us to shed additional light on the timing and appearance of modern humans at the beginning of the Later Stone Age in Africa.”  Frederick E. Grine’s project, Stereolithographic Reconstruction and 3-D Radiographic Analysis of a Late Pleistocene Human Skull from South Africa, which was published in Science in 2007, was recognized by Time magazine as one of the top ten science stories for that year.  According to Dr. Grine, Professor of Anthropology and Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook University (SUNY), a nearly complete human cranium was discovered some 50 years ago in a dry river channel near the town of Hofmeyr, South Africa. This specimen has been dated to approximately 36,000 years before present, a significant finding in view of the lack of human fossils from the Late Pleistocene of sub-Saharan Africa, the time when, and place where, the modern humans who migrated out to inhabit the rest of the world first appeared. The Hofmeyr cranium had been seriously damaged since its discovery, with large portions of the face and braincase missing.  Study of the fossil, insofar as it is preserved, revealed intriguingly close affinities to penecontemporaneous crania from the Upper Palaeolithic of Eurasia.