A substantive letter by a native of New York State writing from Georgia who was headed to Florida, referencing the Second Seminole War (1835–42) and offering an eye-witness description and opinions of a slave auction in downtown Augusta. Justin Shapley (?–1892) opens this letter to his family back home in.....
A compelling, unrecorded film-script for a movie-that-never-was dramatizing the infamous assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico, with twenty-nine recommended changes in manuscript. In 1958, Hollywood director of low-budget Western films George Sherman (1908–1991) was in Mexico shooting the movie The Last of the Fast Guns (1958) when a journalist offered.....
A compelling artifact of the life of a participant in the Boston Tea Party who also served in the Revolutionary War, with miscellaneous entries relating to the war, other notes, and numerous account entries. Samuel Sprague (1753–1844) was a twenty year old mason’s apprentice when he happened upon friends on.....
An early manuscript register of students drafted by a girl attending what would become the longest operating boarding school in the United States, including two sisters apparently absent from the school’s official history. Anna Thomas, who was among the first 250 girls to enroll at Westtown School, “which commenced.....
![Item #7209 [Autograph letter regarding her availability to give a lecture, her fee, etc.]. Mabel...](/pictures/thumb/7209_1.jpg?v=1640794864)
A letter by lecturer-writer Mabel L. Todd to a Massachusetts woman (and member of the American Home Missionary Society) concerning her lectures which featured photo-slides. Mabel L. Todd (1856–1932) attended Georgetown Female Seminary and the New England Conservatory of Music. In 1876 she married astronomer David Todd, and in.....
![Item #3076 [President Harry Truman Receives a Gift of Cowboy Boots]. Harry Truman](/pictures/thumb/3076_1.jpg?v=1560463247)
A striking and unusually large photograph, inscribed by Truman to Fred Perkins. Truman is shown here receiving a pair of cowboy boots, handed to him by US Representative Ed Gossett of Texas. To the right of Gossett is Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, and to his left likely another.....
An impassioned letter describing the mood of the Union soldiers upon hearing the news of Lincoln’s death, and expressing their collective determination for revenge. Written from Tennessee the day after Lincoln’s assassination, William Underwood’s letter to his wife Jane expresses the anger and sadness sweeping the whole camp—with the exception.....
An inventory of property including nine named slaves and two unnamed child slaves of a recently-deceased Kentucky slaveholder who liberated his slaves to emigrate to Liberia on his and his wife’s deathbeds. In this document, nine named adult slaves owned by Isaac Webb Jr. are valued from $100 to $450.....
A letter from Booker T. Washington to the Home Science Publishing Company, a hub of America’s Progressive Era dietary reform movement. Though the “little story” that Washington here recommends for publication seems not to have reached the press, the letter testifies to Washington’s personal interest and involvement in the racially.....
![Item #2806 [Letter of Invitation to Sam Houston]. John Willis](/pictures/thumb/2806_1.jpg?v=1560463186)
An intriguing letter to Sam Houston as a U.S. Senator, from a party of Virginia democrats, docketed by Houston. This is an ostensibly routine invitation to a July 28th and 29th 1848 mass meeting at the Orange Co., Virginia Court House, written by several prominent Virginia Democrats. Though the real.....