Copies of French Manuscripts for American History in the Library of Congress

Abstract

Two of the features which distinguished American historical scholarship at the beginning of the twentieth century were a preoccupation with the collection of sources and the reorientation of interest from Europe and the Atlantic seaboard to the American West. Armed with the new weapons of critical methodology and the heady ambition to make history scientific, the first generation of professional historians set out with remarkable determination to gather historical manuscripts. At the same time, the closing of the frontier, and the Turner thesis which reflected it, opened the serious study of the history of the Mississippi Valley. Not surprisingly, these two currents, which merged in the foundation of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, led to programs for exploiting the sources for American history to be found in European libraries and archives. Addressing the Mississippi Valley Historical Association at its first annual meeting Clarence Alvord complained that we have been writing of the French in the Mississippi Valley, and of British policy in the West, without searching in the chief depositories for our material, and proposed the copying of relevant material in Europe.' In the same year, 1908, the Conference of State and Local Historical Societies, aware that copying had already begun in Britain, recommended that French archives, as the richest field of practically unexplored material, be searched as a preliminary to the copying of their American contents.2 In fact,