![[Botanical drawings and letters]. Jacob Whitman Bailey.](/pictures/thumb/2500_1.jpg?v=1492553192)
A series of detailed botanical drawings by noted American scientist Jacob Whitman Bailey (1811–1857), accompanied by four letters written when he was a young Army officer stationed in the South at the time of the nullification crisis in 1833. Jacob Whitman Bailey, a graduate of West Point, went on...
An interesting letter revealing some of the difficulties involved in the life of an itinerant artist in the first half of the nineteenth century, addressed to Abraham Bell & Son, a Quaker shipping firm located in New York City. Edouart, writing from Saratoga, is inquiring about his supply cases which...
![[A letter describing Yellowstone National Park]. George Ely.](/pictures/thumb/4151_1.jpg?v=1502730720)
An evocative letter describing some of the wonders of Yellowstone, written just a little over a decade after the region was first extensively explored and designated a National Park. Writing from Mammoth Hot Springs, Ely notes that he has arrived, having traveled 800 miles from Fargo to Livingston [Montana...
![[A pair of manuscript letters from Savannah, Georgia]. Charles Hunt.](/pictures/thumb/4150_1.jpg?v=1501860042)
Two letters written from Savannah, Georgia by Charles B. Hunt of Gorham, Maine, a state representative, senator, and merchant, providing an interesting account of the city in the 1840s, including a detailed description of a slave auction and considerable political commentary. Hunt, a native of Gorham Maine and a....
James responds to an invitation from author Poultney Bigelow to attend a dinner at the Author’s Club of London: “I am not a member of the A.C., & one of the reasons is, precisely, that I may not have to go to their dinners. I never go to ‘annual’ dinners...
Manuscript map and small lot of letters and documents of a respected Michigan pioneer early at the center of the state’s 19th Century lumbering boom. The letters, all pertaining to lumbering concerns over the winter of 1863–4, address such matters as the settling of deals and accounts, low water levels...
![[George Mason Imploring John A. Washington to Seize the Guns of Slaves and Free Blacks]. George Mason.](/pictures/thumb/4146_1.jpg?v=1501861385)
An urgent letter from one descendant of a founding father to another on a proposed plan to seize firearms from slaves and free blacks of Fairfax County, Virginia, in the aftermath of the 1859 John Brown raid a week earlier. George Mason, grandson of the revolutionary statesman of the same...
![[Urgent Manuscript Letter to Stephen Van Rensselaer Regarding "our Indians" during the Lead Up to the Trail of Tears]. Thomas Loraine McKenney.](/pictures/thumb/3822_1.jpg?v=1492554932)
A letter from “the pioneer of North American Ethnography,” likely soliciting support for the Indian Removal Act and exhibiting the damaging attitude held by even the most benevolent administrators. Thomas McKenney, inaugural Superintendent of the Office of Indian Affairs and the driving force behind the both the famous History...
![[Letter Signed, To Eminent Conchologist John Jay Regarding Shell Collection and Classification]. Matthew C. Perry.](/pictures/thumb/3790_1.jpg?v=1491582383)
A fascinating letter written by Commodore Perry during his renowned first voyage to Japan, discussing the shipment, sorting, and classification of shells, some of them intended as contributions to what would become for many years the most important shell collection in the United States. The collection, now housed as the...