George Washington is widely known to have had no biological children of his own. Less well known is his role in raising several of the children and grandchildren of Martha Washington’s marriage to her first husband, Daniel Parke Custis. In this informal conversation with Manuscript Division curator Julie Miller and archivist Kate Madison, Cassandra Good, …
"The queen of all hags.” This brief, bitter comment appears on the back of an 1829 letter to Albany, New York, bookseller W. C. Little, and was most likely written by him about its sender, author Anne Royall. What exactly did Royall do to Little to deserve a comment like this? Who was she?
Manuscript Division intern Maureen S. Thompson describes the experience of locating African Americans in the Blair Family Papers, and highlights some of the notable documents she discovered.
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Fifty-six unpublished, mostly newly acquired letters from Philip Schuyler (1733-1804) to his daughter, Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, and her husband Alexander Hamilton, have been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.
