Fifty-six unpublished, mostly newly acquired letters from Philip Schuyler (1733-1804) to his daughter, Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, and her husband Alexander Hamilton, have been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.
In 1797 Vice-President Thomas Jefferson learned that the perpetrator of the Yellow Creek Massacre was not the man he had named in his Notes on the State of Virginia. A letter newly acquired by the Manuscript Division tells the story.
A marble case in the Great Hall in the Thomas Jefferson Building once held the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. This blog describes that “shrine,” from its opening in 1924 to its closing ceremony in 1952.
Philip Schuyler's letters about yellow fever in the Alexander Hamilton Papers reveal a complicated and many-sided character responding to a dangerous and frightening moment in American history.
The business records of two early American Quaker merchants, recently acquired by the Library’s Manuscript Division, show trade with the Lenape Indians, recovery after the devastation of the Revolutionary War, and two American cities coming into their own.
Before the modern textbook, Western school-age children learned mathematical concepts through what was called the "cyphering tradition" and created textbooks of their very own. The volumes in the recently processed Ellerton-Clements Cyphering Book Collection will certainly be of interest to those who study math and early modern education, but many also possess a unique kind of artistry.
George Washington’s farm reports provide us precise details about the lives of the hundreds of workers, free and enslaved, on the president’s Mount Vernon estate, including the amount of time that the enslaved were sick or in “child bed”.