The American Indian in Manuscript: Preparing a Guide to Holdings in the Library of the American Philosophical Society

Abstract

During the past century and a half, the Library of the American Philosophical Society has received a considerable number of manuscripts relating to the American Indian. nature and quantity of these manuscripts are not generally known, despite references to many of them in publications of the Society and elsewhere. One consequence of this fact is that students of the American Indian now write in ignorance of important and, frequently, unique materials. 1 Another is that, although the card catalog is unusually complete, the Library and its committees have no ready description of its present holdings as a guide to future policy. For these reasons, the Library's sub-committee for the Phillips Fund, the chairman of which was the late anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn, recommended in 1959 the preparation of a guide 'to the materials on the American Indian in the collections of the Society, as the first step in The Library's New Program in American Indian Linguistics and Ethnohistory.