Indian Rights Association records

Work on processing the Indian Rights Association records (Collection 1523) has begun and will continue for the next three months. This is another one of the Civic Engagement collections funded by NHPRC. Since portions of the collection had been previously processed here at HSP our work will consist of arranging the part of the collection [...]

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Morris Milgram’s early years

While processing the business records portion of the Morris Milgram Papers I found numerous references to Milgram’s expulsion from CUNY (City College, City University of New York). But that’s all I had seen so far; vague references and comments about how the event was not only revealing of his political compromise in his early years [...]

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Morris Milgram and his (expected and unexpected) connections

As part of the NHPRC Civic Engagement Project we’ve begun arranging the papers of Morris Milgram. This collection features portions of materials that are nicely organized as well as boxes of loose papers waiting to be sorted; it is a treasure trove of office records and personal documents offering a detailed account of the ins-and-outs [...]

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Further thoughts on processing and the Greenfield papers

Arranging work on the Albert M. Greenfield papers is almost done but we have lots of work to do to complete the finding aid. This collection is very large, so it’s taking us a lot of time to input the collection’s data into Archivists’ Toolkit, the software we’re using here to create EAD finding aids. [...]

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“Benjamin West, the subject of the following Memoirs,. . .

. . . was the youngest son of John West and Sarah Pearson and was born near Springfield, in Chester [now Delaware] County, in the State of Pennsylvania, on the 10th of October, 1738.” So begins Scottish writer John Galt’s The Life, Studies, and Works of Benjamin West, Esq., a 2-volume work published in 1816 [...]

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HSP Civic Engagement Collections: A new NHPRC-funded project

This month HSP begins a new 26-month project to process and conserve fourteen collections related to civic engagement in Philadelphia and beyond. Willhem Echevarría has already started work as project archivist, and in December he will be joined by Leah Mackin as project preservation technician. Previously, both Willhem and Leah worked on our Chew papers [...]

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Robert Proud: Quaker, Classicist, Historian, and Loyalist

I never thought that when working as an Archives Intern at HSP I would come across a collection that had some personal resonance.  But when handed the Robert Proud collection to process, I learned that history can connect to one’s life in bizarre ways. Robert Proud was born in Yorkshire, England in 1728.  He attended [...]

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Wrapping up, or a fond goodbye

While I’ve made announcements to many people about my departure from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, I have not shared this news with you, readers of Fondly, Pennsylvania. Since blogging about archives at HSP moved forward because of my desire to see it happen, I feel a deep attachment to the community of readers we [...]

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All the world’s a stage

HSP has a large collection or programs, playbills, and other ephemera from Philadelphia’s Academy of Music (once called the American Academy of Music), dating from its beginnings in the late 1850s to the late 20th century.  The collection was recently adopted and is my current processing project.  Though I’ve barely scratched the surface (having just [...]

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Updated descriptions and new finding aids available

We have written a lot about process here on Fondly, Pennsylvania to let you know what projects we have in the works, but I realized that we have not kept up with telling everyone what we’ve completed.  There are 51 collections included in the Digital Center for Americana project, and at this point, 22 collections [...]

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