A volume containing the letters of Quaker loyalist Rebecca Rawle Shoemaker to her husband, Samuel Shoemaker, who was exiled in England, describes the plight of Quakers and loyalists in Philadelphia after the Revolutionary War.
A close look at an early nineteenth-century ledger kept by John Thomson Mason (1765-1824) to record the business of his Maryland plantation, “Montpelier,” reveals information about the lives of the enslaved and formerly enslaved people who lived and worked there.
An 1837 map of Marietta, Ohio, contained in the papers of archaeologist E. G. Squier, tells a rich story of Indigenous architecture, nationalist aspirations, and Midwestern pride.
People with grievances often make the best preservers of the past – as in this 1801 letter from Pierre Charles L’Enfant to Alexander Hamilton, in which the architect and city planner complains that he was never paid for his work on New York’s Federal Hall in 1789.
Fifty-six unpublished, mostly newly acquired letters from Philip Schuyler (1733-1804) to his daughter, Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, and her husband Alexander Hamilton, have been transcribed by Manuscript Division staff. The transcriptions are now available online, alongside images of the letters, as part of the Alexander Hamilton Papers on the Library of Congress website.
In 1792 Spanish-Peruvian naval officer Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra sailed up the coast of North America to meet with George Vancouver and the leaders of the Nuu-chah-nulth people of Nootka Sound, Vancouver Island. His journal is in the Manuscript Division.