University of Pennsylvania Finding Aids

The Arnold and Deanne Kaplan collection of Early American Judaica contains more than eleven thousand items. These items range in date from the sixteenth century to 1977, with the vast majority of the collection consisting of items from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Geographically, the collection encompasses the entire Western hemisphere in the period before mass migration at the end of the nineteenth century. The collection contains a variety of materials, including trade cards, manuscripts, books, periodicals, printed ephemera, photographs, art, and artifacts.

Daniel Garrison Brinton (1837-1899) was a Philadelphia surgeon and anthropologist who created, collected, and donated collections of books and manuscripts related to anthropology, colonization of the Americas, and native American linguistics. This collection on Spain and New Spain documents, to a limited degree, Spain's relationships with its colonies and other European powers while struggling to maintain its empire.

This collection contains 52 assorted English legal documents. Most are brief transactional records attesting to land sales, contracts, or estate settlements. Though mostly unrelated, there are a few small groups of connected documents, such as the five certificates of payment by Captain Roger Martin to various parties executed during December 1685. Beyond these transactional documents are a 1679 record of arguments before the Privy Council as well as a 1770 warrant for the arrest of Nicholas Gwyn, an Ipswich medical doctor.

Collection concerning Florentine families, organizations, trades, and industries covering the years 1437-1804. The documents that compose the collection are divided into two broad sections, one dedicated to families and organizations, and the other to subjects. The former, arranged alphabetically by name, then chronologically for each family or organization, features documents pertaining to about 130 among the most important Florentine families, as well as institutions such as the Monte di pietà and the hospital of Santa Maria Novella (referred to as Spedale). The families that are best-known in the collection include the Acciaiuoli, Altoviti, Antinori, Corsi, Corsini, Guadagni, Rucellai, Salviati, and Strozzi; the best-represented families in the collection are the Amadori, Capponi, Cassi, Lapini, and Ricciardi. A small number of documents containing information on 3 ships is also present. The latter, arranged alphabetically by subject, and chronologically within each subject, is comprised, for the most part, of numerous kinds financial documents (including accounts, receipts, orders, payments, etc.), and documents related to different aspects of rural life and farm management (such as the purchase of cattle and grains). Other subjects include the guilds of Florence, especially the one of the lanaoioli, wool workers, and that of the setaioli, silk weavers; iron trade; and business relations between Florence and England and Florence and the Netherlands.

This is an autograph collection compiled by Francis Campbell Macaulay. The collection is composed of letters by scientists, politicians, and men of letters, and fragments with signatures. The collection reflects Macaulay's interest in Italian literature, and includes letters from Ludovico Ariosto, Fortunato Cavazzeni Pederzini, and Alessandro Torri. Other notable autographs in the collection are those of Alexandre Dumas, Robert Morris, and Millard Fillmore. The collection also includes several letters to Macaulay regarding the Dante Society, and five volumes of Macaulay's notes for a vocabulary of the dialect of Nice.

Henry Charles Lea was a Philadelphian publisher, civil and public rights activist, mathematician, and and ecclesiastical historian. This collection consists of original manuscripts including trial records, correspondence, a discourse, an edict, a royal proclamation and unidentified French documents.