Lewis Henry Morgan papers

The papers include correspondence to and from Morgan, manuscripts of articles and speeches, manuscript notebooks and travel diaries, and the manuscripts of several of his books. Correspondents include Henry Adams, Adolph F. Bandelier, Charles Darwin, Joseph Henry, Francis Parkman, and Herbert Spencer.

Articles, bibliographies, and books have been based on the Morgan papers. In 1923, Donald B. Gilchrist, Librarian of the University of Rochester, published a "Bibliography of Lewis H. Morgan" in volume two of the Rochester Historical Society's Publication Fund Series. In 1936, he published a pamphlet, "Manuscript Journals and Records of Indian Letters by Lewis Henry Morgan in the Rush Rhees Library," which gave a detailed description of these parts of the papers. This pamphlet is Appendix A.

An article on the collection, "The Lewis Henry Morgan Collection" by Leslie A. White, appeared in The University of Rochester Library Bulletin volume II, no. 3 (1947) p. 48-52. The collection has been entered in the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections as number 61-1662.

The two biographies of Morgan have been based on material in the collection. They are Bernhard Stern, Lewis Henry Morgan, Social Evolutionist, which was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1931 and Carl Resek, Lewis Henry Morgan, American Scholar, which was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1960.

Several parts of the collection have been published separately. These include "Extracts from the European Travel Journal of Lewis Henry Morgan," edited by Leslie A. White and published in volume XVI (1937) of the Rochester Historical Society's Publication Fund Series; The Indian Journals, 1859-62, edited, and with an introduction, by Leslie A. White which was published by the University of Michigan Press in 1959; and Pioneers in American Anthropology: the Bandelier-Morgan Letters, 1873-1883, edited by Leslie A. White and published by the University of New Mexico Press in 1940.

Work slips used by Donald B. Gilchrist in compiling his bibliography of Lewis Henry Morgan, with additional entries for works on Morgan, are shelved immediately after the Manuscript journals.

(The above was written in 1968: the paragraphs that follow were added in 2008 and 2010.)

Several important books on Morgan have appeared since this register was originally compiled. They include Thomas R. Trautmann, Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987; Elisabeth Tooker, Lewis H. Morgan on Iroquois Material Culture, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994; and Daniel Noah Moses, The Promise of Progress: the Life and Work of Lewis Henry Morgan, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009.

The Indian Journals, 1859-1862 (1959) was reprinted by Dover Publications in 1993. It is important to realize that the pagination of the reprint differs from that of the original volume. Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship (1987) was reprinted by the University of Nebraska Press in 2008. Thomas Trautmann, the author, has provided a new introduction, three new appendices and an updated bibliography.