A few months ago I came across an 1862 letter from William Cooper Nell, one of the nation’s earliest Black historians, an educator, and abolitionist. In it he discusses work on a second edition of The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, originally published in 1855. It was something of a revelation since I had…

This post is by Elizabeth Vitek, Cataloger, American Historical Manuscript Collection The process of becoming a naturalized citizen in America is older than the United States itself. Before the United States was an independent nation, a person of foreign nationality had to become a naturalized citizen of the American colonies through the British Supreme Court. On April…

This post was written by cataloger Catherine Falzone. If Marie Antoinette had survived the French Revolution, she might have come to live in the Pennsylvania woods. The American Historical Manuscript Collection (AHMC) contains documents from the founding of Asylum (or Azilum), the French refugee settlement located in Pennsylvania that was intended for the French royals….

While preparing for a presentation about the intellectual foundations of American political thought, I consulted Donald Lutz’s book A Preface to American Political Theory which offers an interesting introduction into an extremely complicated aspect of American history. Among several things that piqued my interest was Lutz’s discussion of the Enlightenment origin and conception of “political science,” a term…