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Posted by: Julie Miller
Filed with the correspondence in the George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress are six printed copies of an agreement to boycott British goods that Washington, then a Virginia burgess representing Fairfax County, brought to his constituents to sign. The agreement, crafted by the colony’s House of Burgesses (the lower house of Virginia’s colonial …
Posted in: Early America, Politics
Posted by: Julie Miller
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, …
Posted in: Early America, Events
Posted by: Julie Miller
"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?
Posted in: Early America, Women's & Gender History
Posted by: Julie Miller
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.
Posted in: Early America, Letters, War and Society, Women's & Gender History
Posted by: Julie Miller
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.
Posted in: African American History, Early America
Posted by: Julie Miller
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.
Posted in: Early America, Politics
Posted by: Julie Miller
Early American business records in the Manuscript Division tell an unexpected story about independent women.
Posted in: Early America, Women's & Gender History
Posted by: Julie Miller
Fifty-six unpublished, mostly newly acquired letters from Philip Schuyler (1733-1804) to his daughter, Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, and her husband Alexander Hamilton, have been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.
Posted in: Digital Collections, Early America, Letters
Posted by: Julie Miller
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.
Posted in: Early America, Hispanic and Latino History, Of Note