Digital Collections
A Century of Progress: The 1933-34 World's Fair
The First American West: The Ohio River Valley, 1750-1820
Goodspeed Manuscript Collection
Philip M. Klutznick: Community Builder, Jewish and Civic Leader, Diplomat
Rose & Chess: Le Roman de la Rose & Le Jeu des échecs moralisé

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Access

All access to manuscript collections is provided in accordance with the Polices Governing the Use of Archives, Manuscripts, and Special Collections.Access to the manuscript holdings is provided through the Library's catalog, guides, finding aids, and inventories in the Special Collections Research Center. Finding aids converted to digital form can be searched online. A Codex Manuscript Short Title Catalog provides brief identifications of medieval, Renaissance, early modern, and modern manuscripts shelved by manuscript number. A series of linked Web pages provide a Subject Guide to Modern Manuscript and Archival Collections.

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Overview

The manuscript holdings of the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chicago Library span the period from the second century A.D. to the present. The Library acquired its first manuscript material with the purchase of the Berlin Collection [view online Berlin Collection exhibition catalogue] by William Rainey Harper in 1891, and the collections have continued to grow in response to the academic needs of the University of Chicago faculty and students. The manuscript collection of the John Crerar Library was added in 1984. The current extent of the manuscript collections is 9,469 linear feet.

Early manuscripts include the Edgar J. Goodspeed Manuscript Collection, late medieval and Renaissance secular and religious texts, the Sir Nicholas Bacon Collection of English Court and Manorial Documents, the Samuel R. and Marie-Louise Rosenthal Collection of Northern Italian Documents, commonplace books, musical scores, sermons, papal dispatches, poetry, and letters. Related to these materials are the professional papers of two University of Chicago faculty members, John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert, and the records of two manuscript-based projects they directed, the compilation of the life records of Geoffrey Chaucer and the preparation of a critical edition of the Canterbury Tales published in 1940.

Among the more important of the modern manuscript collections are the editorial files of Poetry Magazine, which contain letters and manuscripts of many leading American and English poets of the first half of the twentieth century, including T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Amy Lowell, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Sara Teasdale, William Carlos Williams, and William Butler Yeats; the personal papers of Poetry's editor, Harriet Monroe; and the papers of Morton D. Zabel and others associated with the publication of modern poetry, especially in Chicago.

The modern manuscripts also include the William E. Barton Collection of Lincolniana; the papers of Stephen A. Douglas; the Reuben T. Durrett Collection on Kentucky and the Ohio River Valley; the Joseph Halle Schaffner Collection in the History of Science; materials on drama and theatrical performance in Chicago and other cities, including the Napier Wilt Index of Chicago Theatrical Performances and the William Harlowe Briggs Collection of Dramatic Criticism; the Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey completed by the WPA in 1942; the records of organizations associated with the post-World War II atomic scientists' movement; papers and records related to organizations promoting world government and international law; records of the International Association for Cultural Freedom and its predecessor the Congress for Cultural Freedom; the John Crerar Library manuscript collection in the history of science and medicine; and the Archives of Czechs and Slovaks Abroad .

In 2007, the archival and manuscript collections of the Chicago Jazz Archive were transferred to the Special Collections Research Center.Among the records of other organizations and institutions are those of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs, American Association for Public Opinion Research, the Illinois chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, Carnegie Council on Children, Chicago Child Care Society, Committee on Education for American Citizenship, Commission on Freedom of the Press, and Emil Schwarzhaupt Foundation. Records of three local Chicago neighborhood organizations, the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference, the South East Chicago Commission, and the Hyde Park Historical Society, are also part of the holdings.

Collections of personal papers in the University of Chicago and John Crerar Library collections include those of Loammi Baldwin, William Beaumont, Saul Bellow, Samuel Burrows, Morris R. Cohen, Helen I. Dennis, Cora DuBois, Morris Fishbein, Joel Goldsmith, Clifford Grulee, Emil J. Gumbel, John Gunther, Joel Tanner Hart, Ludwig V. Hektoen, Julius H. Hess, James B. Herrick, Bayard Taylor Holmes, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, Salmon O. Levinson, Stephen Longstreet, Frank O. Lowden, Arno B. Luckhardt, Albert Mayer, Harriet Brainard Moody, Michael Polanyi, Julius Rosenwald, Nicholas Senn, Gitel Steed, Virgil Vogel, Ida B. Wells, and Joshua Lacy Wilson.