Jernegan-Littlefield Collection of Early Textbooks

William Rainey Harper founded the University of Chicago in 1891 as an educational experiment, with a plan that included publication, extension courses, and other strategies to disseminate and apply research findings. Harper's original plan was soon extended to encompass the University Elementary School under John Dewey's leadership, responding to the need to test pedagogical theories in an instructional context. The University of Chicago Library's core Berlin Collection, which contained numerous works on education and textbooks written by Erasmus, Lorenzo Valla, Theodore Gaza, and other sixteenth-century humanists, supported this early interest in educational theory and practice.

During the early decades of the twentieth century, University of Chicago faculty began to focus on American history, and textbooks were sought as primary source materials. Through Marcus Jernegan, a member of the History Department who studied the English roots of education in colonial America, the University of Chicago in 1915 purchased a collection of early English and American textbooks. The collection of 200 texts, principally from the period between 1650 and 1776, had been formed by the Boston bookseller and bibliographer George Emery Littlefield. The Jernegan-Littlefield Collection now numbers about 700 volumes.

For further information on the Jernegan-Littlefield Collection, please contact:

Special Collections Research Center
University of Chicago Library
1100 E. 57th Street
Chicago, Illinois 60637
SpecialCollections@lib.uchicago.edu.