University of Pennsylvania Finding Aids

This collection consists of manuscripts and papers relating primarily to seveententh and eighteenth century Ireland and Great Britain formerly owned by A.C. Elias, a literary scholar who wrote extensively on Jonathan Swift and his circle.

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.

Compagnie de Commerce de Lorraine was founded by Duke Leopold of Lorraine in 1724, with Regard d'Aubonne as director general and Claude Regnault among its other directors, and dissolved by the 1760s. One purpose of the company was to protect commerce in the duchy from the French economic crisis precipitated by the inflation and crash of the stock of John Law's Compagnie des Indes. These 31 files include a few printed documents pertaining to the establishment of the Compagnie and numerous account calculations and documents concerning the liquidation of the Compagnie.

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.

Roberto Morgadanes, a native of Mexico, studied for his doctorate in Romance languages at the University of Pennsylvania from 1940 to 1942, specializing in the origin of colonial Mexican drama. This collection consists of documents relating to Roberto Morgadanes's studies as well as original Mexican religious dramas, mainly dating from the late 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century.

This collection consists primarily of documents concerning government administration in Ireland during the tenures of Sir Robert Southwell (1635-1702) and his son Edward Southwell (1671-1730) as Secretaries of State for Ireland. The documents here are largely miscellaneous in nature but are clustered around a few themes. Highlights include lists of rents and financial transactions from the period after Cromwell’s invasion and before the Williamite war in Ireland, a 1689 eyewitness letter recounting the battle of Derry, a series of documents related to admiralty, smuggling, and collecting maritime revenue in the first decade of the eighteenth century, an inventory of maps of Ireland, and a substantive series of petitions relating to Richard Blake of Ardfry.

The General Administration Collection Pre-1820 documents the institutional and education activities of the University of Pennsylvania from its founding in 1749 to 1820.

The Rev. William Smith (1727-1803) was the first Provost of the College of Philadelphia (now the University of Pennsylvania). In addition to his teaching duties, Smith was an Anglican clergyman in Philadelphia and active in Pennsylvania politics in support of the Penn family prior to the American Revolution. The papers primarily document Smith's public and political activities from 1753 to 1775.