Since opening in 1935, the Griffith Observatory has become one of the most-visited public observatories in the world. In the 1950s they sought to reach amateur astronomers near and far through print. This astrorama printed in 1952 is a volvelle that the user can adjust to observe visible constellations over time and includes a list of visible stars and constellations.

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Born in New Hampshire in 1815 and a graduate of Harvard Law, Holmes practiced law in St. Louis before returning to become a professor at Harvard. Despite this success, the legal field, it seems never caught his attention. Holmes did no legal writing, but was widely interested in other subjects, especially those related to philosophy and science. When he was nearly 80 years old, he wrote this extensive treatise on gravitation and electricity that is remarkable for its length, detail, and evidence of wide-ranging intellectual curiosity.

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Comparatively less is known about Jane Duval Leiper Kane (1796-1866) than the men in her family who led high-profile careers in law (husband, John K. Kane) and arctic exploration (son, Elisha K. Kane). Yet, amid the family’s papers at the APS, there are a number of letters by and to Jane. This volume of sheet music, labeled with her maiden name and thus likely from her younger years, contains 23 musical pieces two of which look to be handwritten. Together, the volume provides another window onto the life and times of the Kane family’s matriarch.

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Many Philadelphians know of the role Benjamin Franklin played in organizing the first fire brigades and fire insurance company in colonial America. This Spanish volume published nearly a century later detailed both theoretical and practical methods for extinguishing fires and includes remarkably detailed illustrations of firefighters at work.

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Want to go for a ride but don’t want to feel the bumps in the road? This 18th-century French report details the author’s newly-invented suspension system, which featured elastic chains to replace springs and braces on horse-drawn vehicles. The invention allowed the carriage to sit above the wheel mechanism, improving shock absorption and provide a safer, more comfortable ride.

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With over 350 hand-drawn illustrations, this manuscript journal details a vast array of plants specific to France. The lengthy alphabetical index includes over 450 species and varieties. The manuscript was compiled in the early 19th century by Jean Kürssner, a well-regarded horticulturist from Colmar. For each plant, Kürssner notes both their Latin and vernacular name, before describing the physical characteristic, and usages, a number of which are medicinal.

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In this detailed memoir of eight visits to Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition in 1876 and 1877, Charles E. Wriggens set out explicitly with the goal to preserve his recollections for posterity. Wriggens sought to “indelibly impress them upon his own mind” and preserve those memories to “hand them down from one generation to another until the next Centennial, or until 1976.” The memoir thus spans 106 manuscript pages across 2 volumes.

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Beginning only a couple decades after the first recorded chiropractic adjustment, these handwritten diaries of Charles Chute (1877-1952), a Los Angeles-based chiropractor, offer insight into the infancy of chiropractic interventions. Chute’s entries across 21 volumes cover World War II and the Korean War; his chiropractic practice, including descriptions of manipulations and drawing blood; and his ventures into Hollywood.

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When this unidentified female nurse held an internship at Philadelphia’s Germantown Hospital in 1909-1912, she attended lectures on everything from etiquette to infectious disease to anatomy. The notes in her journal fill 160 pages with detailed instructions. The first section stresses a nurse's proper attitude, obedience, and general ethos, but later lectures dove into medical treatment. For example, a lecture from a Dr. Cameron on November 13, 1911, provided a “Synopsis of Influenza” and other infectious diseases including a history of epidemics, symptoms, and treatment.

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In just two entries in his expense account book in the fall of 1839, John S. Williamson noted that he "Traded 250 Trees to Leonard Wheeler for gold watch" and "Sold to James Nelson $20 worth of trees at 1 1/2 cts per Bud." That's a lot of trees!

His account book documents the work of Williamson, a Mulberry and fruit tree agent from New Jersey, as he traveled in Pennsylvania and the Midwest in the 1830s and 40s, a period that paralleled the peak and demise of the silk worm and mulberry tree planting craze in America. It adds to the Society's rich collection of travel accounts as well as collections in natural history. It also provides a window onto the rapid expansion and financial prosperity of white society during and in the aftermath of Indian Removal when Indigenouse communities were expelled from lands between the Illinois and Ohio Rivers.

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Samuel Bard (1742-1821, APS 1767) was one of the most important early American physicians. He cared for George Washington and helped found the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York, the first medical college in New York and the second in America. This volume is a first edition of Bard's A Discourse on Medical Education (New York, 1819), that belonged to Samuel Mitchill, who taught at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, founded the New York Academy of Sciences, and served in the U.S. Senate from 1804-1809.

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This 19th-century sketchbook includes about 30 astronomical illustrations done by a schoolgirl from Greenwich, most likely Connecticut. The stars in the sketches are depicted according to relative magnitude and signaled with bejeweled costume inlays.

This item has been adopted by Marna C. Whittington.

In 1778, revolutionary war soldiers and their families needed help to make it through winter. This invoice dated December 11, 1778 includes 25 expense lines submitted by the town of Wallingford to the State of Connecticut for the support of individual families, each with a “stipulated price” and a much higher “price given.” Each amount is different, suggesting that the support was rendered as needed, rather than a fixed stipend. The item adds to the Society's rich collection on experiences of war during the American Revolution.

This item was adopted in honor of William Craig.

Do your kids love animal books? Children interested in animal facts in the late-18th century could flip through the 60 illustrations in Tommy Trip’s Pictures of Birds and Beasts… Published for the Benefit of the little Masters and Misses of the United States of America. Each woodcut engraving is paired with a brief poem and descriptive information on animals from reindeer to tortoises. Though reprinted several times and advertised in 1791, 1793, and 1794, this volume from 1792 is the only known American edition to survive.

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Published in 1577, Sermonario en lengua Mexicana is a first edition of the first book of sermons published in Nahuatl, an Indigenous language of Central Mexico and the most spoken Indigenous language in Philadelphia today. Most of the volume is printed in Nahuatl in two columns, while most of the Cathecismo is printed in parallel columns of Nahuatl and Spanish.

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Charles Darwin’s work providing the first compelling mechanism to account for organismal evolutionary change made him one of the most influential scientists of all time, made only more influential by the numerous languages his work has been translated into. With this first edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species in Turkish, published in 1970, the APS adds one more volume to its large (over 4,800 printed items!) collection of Darwin printed material. This first Turkish edition of Origin was translated by Öner Ünalan, who was also well known for his translations of Einstein. 

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During the harsh winter of 1778 that the Continental Army weathered at Valley Forge, Colonel Clement Biddle (1740-1814) served as the commissary general in charge of forage, reporting directly to Quartermaster General Nathanael Greene. In this letter, however, Biddle goes beyond his role of supplying provisions in an attempt to use family connections to gain intelligence. He sought out his cousin’s help in securing a large supply of Nicholas Scull’s incredibly detailed 1759 map of Pennsylvania.

We don't know Edward's response, but it seems unlikely that 30 copies of the rare and expensive printed map were still squirreled away in the family's inventory, but APS does have an original 1759 print along with three modern reprints. Either way, the nexus of Valley Forge and one of colonial America's most celebrated maps is intriguing from a number of angles.

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Just three years after Benjamin Franklin published his Observations on the causes and cures of smoky chimneys (1787), this rare German-language book is a first edition from 1790 that adds to the considerable literature in the 18th and 19th centuries on stoves, heating, and the causes and cures of smoky chimneys.

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The APS’s Library’s Colonel Richard Gimbel Collection of Thomas Paine Papers, a heterogenous mix of more than 4,500 items written by, to, or about Thomas Paine is likely the largest such collection to exist and the Society is always looking to add to it.

This curious short volume is attributed to Thomas Paine, but the true author is almost certainly Samuel York Atlee (1809-1895), who would have been about 17 years old when it was written (well after Paine’s death in 1809).

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When George Washington died on December 14, 1799, the nation mourned and in so doing produced an extraordinary amount of print and other material that paid tribute to the nation’s first president. This 1801 engraving by Thomas Clarke features classical imagery, including an obelisk and a weeping willow alongside three mourners. Two of the mourners sob into handkerchiefs while the third carries an anchor, a traditional symbol of hope, steadfastness, or salvation.

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In 1905, the Chautauqua School of Nursing lectures bound together here comprised the seminal textbook of a would-be registered nurse in a time when the profession was still ill-defined. The volume aimed for “success in the truest sense.” This top-bound volume belonged to a Miss Sara Batchelder, who left many penciled notes and drawings throughout the text.

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An amateur vintner outside of Philadelphia, Thomas Livezey, writing just after the adoption of the new federal constitution, found the process of making wine analogous to the formation of the new federal government of the United States. After providing detailed, step-by-step instructions on “making the best Federal Wine” from gathering grapes to adding sugar to fermentation, he left it to his friend to consider “Whether it does not in some measure resemble the process in making a good Federal government that is, first a fermentation then the Scum gets Uppermost, which must be Gradually Removed and thrown aside before the Genuine Wine of a Federal Government becomes finally prepared and can safely be kept without Sowering the people who live under it.”

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The promise of discovering a cure-all for ailments has a long history, though the methods have changed over time. This 1908 promotional card from the Philadelphia Research Laboratory suggested that “demonstrating blood cell serums” could show “how rapidly chronic and supposedly incurable diseases are relieved.” Consultation was free, but the advertisement did not include information about the costs of treatment.

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In the wake of the American Revolution, British math textbooks simply would not do for budding American mathematicians. Nicolas Pike, a Harvard graduate and school teacher, saw this as an opportunity and in 1788 published his New and Complete System of Arithmetic—Composed for the Use of the Citizens of the United States, the first such volume to be published in the U.S. This letter to a prominent Connecticut merchant, announced that Pike had completed his book of Arithmetic, that it was “already adopted as a Collegiate Book in some of the New England Universities,” and described its binding and the prices of copies being offered to booksellers. The book would go through six editions over the next 50 years.

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This Moravian confirmation manual was printed in the Labrador Inuktitut language in 1927 and joins other materials related to Indigenous languages and cultures in APS collections that relate to over 650 different Indigenous cultures throughout the Americas.

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This manuscript journal from the 1840s records three years of experiments and professional development by a self-taught Maine chemist and inventor. Edward Kent begins his journal with an entry that reads: “Having lately read a few works on the subject of chemistry, and taken a great interest in the science, I have determined to commence a study of it.” He then goes on to describe his various experiments and their outcomes including attempts at producing different colors of ink and experiments with ether, nitrate, silver, and other substances. He found success selling the ink he produced and went on to develop a patent for the refinement of gold aimed at California prospectors.

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Amid a nation at war with itself, Rev. Elias B. Hillard set out to photograph the last surviving Revolutionary War veterans. Published in 1864, The Last Men of the Revolution, pairs portraits and lithographs of the homes of six of those veterans with short biographies. This new acquisition joins the APS's large collection of materials related to the American Revolution and its commemoration, including those from the David Library of the American Revolution that arrived in 2020.

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This small collection of allotment patents and deeds are from the early 20th century and were issued to members of the Chickasaw Nation and were signed, sealed, and effected in accordance with the Dawes and Curtis Acts. The Dawes Act, passed in 1887, also known as the General Allotment Act, broke up reservation land, held in common by members of a tribe, into small allotments to be parceled out to individuals resulting in significant land loss from Native American communities. This addition to the collection provides important contemporary context for collections at the APS that document Indigenous languages and cultures.

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This 1915 translation of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was the first into Greek. Translated by Nikos Kazantzakis, it was likely done from the 6th London edition from 1872. The edition omits the editorial, glossary, index, and portrait of Darwin that had been included in most European translations, but it did include, in the last portion of the final chapter, the lines on the Creator, which Darwin was forced to add to his second and later editions due to controversy surrounding its absence in the first edition of 1959. This volume adds to the APS’s Valentine Darwin Collection, which contains nearly 5,000 printed items, many translations into a number of languages from around the world.

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To raise capital for the publication of a book, publishers often used a subscription system that involved pre-payment from those interested in the work. An agent traveled with a prospectus and pitched the book to potential buyers.

The APS purchased a manuscript list of subscribers gathered over two years by a subscription agent from 1812-1814 that records the names of those interested in an art and mechanical manual by James Cutbush. It lists 796 subscribers and provides information on: name, residence, number of copies, and binding preference. Some well-known names in the subscription book include APS Members Thomas Jefferson (secretarial signature), Nathaniel Chapman, Caspar Wistar, and Alexander Wilson.

This manuscript offers a glimpse into the network of scientific-minded people in the mid-Atlantic from New York to Virginia.
 

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This archive consists of two manuscript diaries, correspondence, a passport, and other documents relating to Owen’s travels to and work in the California gold fields in 1849 and the early 1850s.

The extensive collection shows an industrious forty-niner setting sail in January 1849 and digging for gold near the headwaters of the Feather River by September. He was successful, but writes of long hours in the water, the difficulties of navigating the river, and the lack of mules. He also reported witnessing the large fire in Sacramento in April 1850.

This material adds to the extensive collection of Western Americana material at the APS, an area of interest since the Lewis and Clark Journals arrived in the early 19th century, and bolsters our holdings in the history of mining.

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These four diaries of Frederick Stanton Perkins, a farmer and artist residing in Burlington, Wisconsin, record the acquisition efforts of this prolific collector of stone and copper artifacts made by Native Americans.

Written in 1889, 1890, 1894, and 1899, Perkins recorded family life and the day-to-day travails of farm labor, but he mainly focuses on his efforts to sell his massive collection of over 20,000 objects to the Smithsonian Institution. During these years he recorded meeting high-powered scholars, collectors, and politicians like Reuben Thwaites, Edward E. Ayer, and President Benjamin Harrison, among others. The Smithsonian eventually acquired most of Perkins’ collection and these diaries offer an example of how institutions acquired the evidence they now offer scholars to examine.

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This rare pamphlet contains the proceedings and text from speeches made at the General Convention of Oklahoma Indians, held at the Brady Hotel in Tulsa on February 26, 1924. The convention resulted in the founding of the short-lived Society of Oklahoma Indians to “protect the civil, social, educational and financial rights of the Indians of the State of Oklahoma.”

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From weighing machines to steam engines to automata, this bound volume of manuscript lectures shows the wide-ranging scientific interests of Franklin Peale. Son of Charles Willson Peale, Franklin was one of the founders of The Franklin Institute and this bound volume contains a number of his lectures from 1831-1833 intended for the city’s tradesmen. The lectures cover approximately 209 handwritten leaves and are mostly mechanical in nature, with additional content on engineering and chemistry. A number of hand-drawn illustrations are found throughout and one of them, of a boiler, is hand-colored.

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Writing in the spring of 1844, George Ord, Jr. (1781-1866, APS 1817) shared a wide variety of updates from Philadelphia. The news ranged from the poor health of fellow APS Member Dr. Mease (APS 1802) to Joseph Smith and the Mormons to criticism of public schooling. In another passage, he details what he knows about Titian Ramsay Peale’s work on the Wilkes Expedition and then notes that the Peale family’s “Philadelphia Museum is dead, or what amounts to the same thing.” He lamented that the building owner’s demands and that “Jugglers, fiddlers, singers, magnetizers, Millerites, now draw weekly crowds to that temple which was formerly dignified with the imposing title of Science.”

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Best known as an engineer who developed one of the earliest refrigeration devices, Thomas Moore (APS 1809) wrote this letter to Cadwalader Evans, Jr., then the President of the Schuylkill Navigation Company, to offer his expertise on improving that river’s canal. Moore cautioned against the proposed method for creating a dam, explaining that “when a dam is extended quite across a River the powers of art fairly overcome the resistance of the Stream… we must go hand in hand with nature or be content to have our views continually thwarted.”

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This rare translation of Franklin’s Way to Wealth in Catalonia, the first appearance of any of Franklin’s work in Catalan, was a highly symbolic act. The translator Gaietà Vidal I Valenciano (1834-1893) sought to counter was he saw as “certain erroneous opinions” about the traditional social hierarchy in Europe with what he saw as idealized American values of work, thrift, and prudence. Even the title, “A book of the people. The road to fortune. Short and simple advice on becoming rich,” was significant in this respect.

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Did you know that it is customary in astronomical photography for the south to be oriented on the top of a plate (as opposed to maps on the earth where north is on top)? This 1968 volume, Exploring Space with a Camera, was commissioned by the United States Air Force and its 230 photos include examples taken by Mercury and Gemini astronauts, as well as images taken from Lunar Orbiter, Surveyor, and several other robot spacecraft.

This book has been adopted. by Marilyn S. Fishman.

As the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence rapidly approaches in 2026, APS is adding to its collections nearly every version of that founding document that it does not already hold. This version, attributed to George Richards, took some artistic license in July 1793 and was described as “long and laborious” in its 24-page interpretation and expansion on the original.

As the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence rapidly approaches in 2026, APS is adding to its collections nearly every version of that founding document that it does not already hold. This version was printed at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876 on the old Ephrata printing press that boasted “On this press the Declaration of Independence was printed in 1776.” 

Space Destination Services was a company formed in the 1990s to provide private services to space. These fund-raising documents pitched their plan to provide consumables—food, beverages, medicine, water, and clothing—to the planned International Space Station Alpha. The company received a few patents for its products and raised money, but ultimately failed to get a NASA contract and folded shortly thereafter.

Ever wondered why your body starts to slow down as you age? According to Hobart Bradstreet it is due to the settling of your spine. This short book walks the reader through his theory and provides a series of stretches that he developed called “Spine Motion” to help combat this settling. The book has three black-and-white illustrations of the part of the human spine, as well as photographs in which Bradstreet is shown performing the stretches as described.

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William “Amos” Wilson (ca. 1762-1821) became a figure in the folklore of late 18th and 19th-century Pennsylvania who “excited so much curiosity in the western part of the state.” In 1785, his sister, Elizabeth was convicted of infanticide for the deaths of her twin sons and sentenced to hang. Wilson, convinced of his sister’s innocence, acquired a pardon for her from the Governor, but arrived too late, “less than five minutes after the fall of the fatal drop.” Grief-stricken, Wilson withdrew from the world and in 1802 took up residence in a cave outside of Harrisburg where he lived out the last 19 years of his life. Wilson’s story was memorialized in this brief, 24-page volume The Pennsylvania Hermit.

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The custom of “letter money” dictated that for every letter that a shipmaster brought to a port and delivered to the postmaster, he should receive the sum of one penny. Ship letter-money originated in the late 17th century as an incentive to deliver the mail from port to post office. The Port of Philadelphia saw more charitable uses for these funds. This 1797 broadside encouraged funds to be given to the Society for the Relief of Poor and Distressed Masters of Ships, a charity founded in 1765.

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This 31-page pamphlet also includes a large fold-out railroad map for the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railway. From the first decade of the 20th-century, it is one of many promotional pamphlets circulating in the aftermath of the Dawes Act passed in 1887. Also known as the General Allotment Act, the law broke up reservation land, held in common by members of a tribe, into small allotments to be parceled out to individuals resulting in significant land loss from Native American communities. This addition to the collection provides important contemporary context for collections at the APS that document Indigenous languages and cultures.

This item has been adopted by James Halpin Hill.

This Letterbook of Colonel Augustus James Pleasonton, Pennsylvania militia commander in the late 1830s and early 1840s, documents a heated dispute between Whigs and Democrats for control of the state House of Representatives in December 1838. Factions disputed which newly-elected members should be seated in that body with Democrats accepting the ruling of election judges and the Whigs supporting the return of the secretary of state. Mobs gathered in Harrisburg and state officials called the militia, which was given magazines of buckshot to quell the eleven-day “rebellion,” giving the incident its name.

The letterbook records Pleasonton’s handling of the bloodless conflict and his years-long defense against accusations of mishandling funds meant to equip the militia. Pleasonton was a general of militia during the Civil War, defending Philadelphia from attack, and his brother Alfred was a Union cavalry general during the war.
 

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In August 1780, wagon master John Thompson of Bucks County, PA, gave this receipt to Quaker Thomas Smith in exchange for Smith’s horse “for the use of the United States.” Notably, Smith was part of a committee appointed in 1778 by the Buckingham Meeting that declared, along with their Quaker commitment to nonviolence that “we cannot be instrumental in the setting up or pulling down of any government, but it becomes us to show forth a peaceable and meek behavior to all men, and to live a useful, sober and religious life, without joining ourselves with any party in war.”

This item has been adopted.