History
British & Colonial
Perhaps the most significant holding relative to British history is an archive of Observer editor James Louis Garvin (1868-1947), which includes almost one hundred sixty of his manuscript notebooks as well as extensive correspondence with prominent British politicians of the 1920s and 1930s. The Garvin Collection is one of the principal sets of British historical papers in the first half of the twentieth century available in this country. Garvin was the editor of the Observer for thirty-four years (1908-1942), and his range of correspondents included Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, and virtually all other leading political figures of the era.
Moving back in time, a selection of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century manuscripts of British historical interest includes The Reading of Carta Forestae by Mr. Treheme of Graies Inne, a 1523 exposition of forest law; a tenth-century treatise on the Exchequer by Richard Fitzneal, Bishop of London (1130-1198) copied over in various hands (ca. 1597); Sir Edward Dering's (1598-1644) notes, comments, and drawings on English heraldry and family history (ca. 1625); The First Booke of Modus Tenendi Parliame: Tum Apud Anglos (1626) by Henry Elsynge the elder (1598-1654); and the speeches of King Charles I (1600-1648) to the Third Parliament, 1628-1629, many of which are unpublished. A "King's Collection" of prose pamphlets by John Milton (1608-1674) and others defending the execution of Charles can be found within the Wrenn Library.
The Queen Anne Collection of eighteenth-century English printed books comprises two thousand volumes and two thousand pamphlets published during the reign of Queen Anne (1702-1714), representing the political, religious, and literary events of the period. The Ralph T. Howey Collection, consisting of the entire stock of this Philadelphia dealer of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century books, contains eleven thousand volumes concerning history, religion, government, law, economics, education, literature, the arts, and travel. Additional printed works, recording and interpreting seventeenth-and eighteenth-century British history, can be found in the libraries of George Atherton Aitken (1860-1917), John Henry Wrenn (d. 1911), Sir Compton Mackenzie (1883-1972), in the Pforzheimer Library (covering 1475-1700), and in the Recusant Collection.
Among manuscript histories of England, two notebooks containing the History of England During the Reign of George III "by Henry Grattan," Irish orator and statesman (1746-1820), remain of uncertain attribution since Grattan's son, the biographer of the elder Grattan and himself a noted author, bore the same name. Robert Forby's (1759-1825) original unpublished manuscript, History of England, is of considerable literary as well as historical interest.
The correspondence of the Duke of Wellington (1769-1852) with a young religious zealot portrays the aging general's generosity and patience. Other items related to British statesmen include: Goldwin Smith's (1823-1910) manuscript biography (ca. 1880) of Edmund Burke (1729-1797) and a collection of several hundred books by and about Burke; over one hundred books and pamphlets by and about Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881); a collection of letters concerning the accusation of adultery which brought the downfall of the politician Sir Charles W. Dilke (1843-1911); a collection of five hundred books by and about Winston Churchill (1874-1965), in addition to one hundred letters written by the prime minister; and diaries and letters of Sir Edward Marsh (1872-1953), English poet, writer, wit, and private secretary to Churchill.
Manuscripts from the colonial period include "Journal of My Life in India, 1825-1857," by Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Cumming Dewar (1803-1880); the diaries and notes of Francis Yeats-Brown (1886-1944), a British army officer and journalist who wrote enthusiastically of India and of the practice of yoga; and the holograph diaries of Alexander Porter, a physician and surgeon, covering his years of service with the Indian army at Madras (1861-1911).
Offering an account of the Arab Revolt is T.E. Lawrence's (1888-1935) earliest surviving draft of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The collection of Basil Liddell Hart (1895-1970) contains hundreds of photographs taken by Lawrence in Arabia, Syria, and France, as well as the manuscript of Hart's biography of Lawrence with the latter's annotations. Books from the library of Lawrence of Arabia are preserved together with his letters and sketchbooks.
Coupled with the flourishing of British culture and art in the nineteenth century was the rise of photography. The camera proved to be the ideal instrument to document and reflect the period, and the results can be studied in the works of a number of artists of the time, including William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), David Octavius Hill (1802-1870), Robert Adamson (1821-1848), Maull & Polyblank (fl. 1850s-1860s), Francis Frith (1822-1898), George Washington Wilson (18231893), James Valentine (1815-1880), Paul Martin (1864-1944), and Sir Cecil Beaton (1904-1980). Papers of British journalist and war correspondent Ernest Smith (1864-1935) chronicle such events as the Dreyfus trials, the Siege of Ladysmith, the Russian famine of 1891-1892, and Smith's visit to the Kimberly mines in South Africa. Nearly one thousand volumes, many bearing his annotations, form the library of George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876-1962), British historian.
Central & South American
The Ransom Center holds a number of materials important to the study of Latin American history, most of which are contained in the collection of Edward Larocque Tinker (1883-1968). An author and philanthropist, Tinker gathered books, art, artifacts, documentary films, and murals depicting all facets of life in South America. Forming part of the collection are sixty-six volumes of documents, letters, and broadsides, largely unpublished, which were acquired by Bolivian scholar and politician Nicolas Acosta (1844-1893). State, ecclesiastical, personal, and literary documents dating from the late sixteenth century to the late nineteenth century provide first-person accounts of Bolivian history as well as histories of Peru and Ecuador. Paintings, drawings, and prints by Florencio Molina Campos (1890-1959), reflecting the life of gauchos on the Argentine pampas, are also present in the Tinker collection. Fine examples of nineteenth-century Mexican leatherwork, saddles, Peruvian silver, stirrups, spurs, and Argentinean gaucho clothing from the Tinker collection are now curated by the Texas Memorial Museum.
The Ransom Center's holdings in this field supplement the vast materials housed in The University's Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, which focuses on materials from and about Latin America, including Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean island nations, South America, and areas of the U.S. during periods of rule by Spain or Mexico.
French
In the area of French history, the Center holds several valuable collections, including the Voltaire Collection of Desmond Flower, comprising fourteen hundred mainly eighteenth-century volumes of works by and about Voltaire (1694-1778).
Materials related to The Diamond Necklace Affair document the 1785 scandal that plagued the court of Louis XVI and contributed to pre-Revolution unrest. The scandal came about as a result of the Comtesse de La Motte's fraudulent attempt to acquire (presumably for Queen Marie-Antoinette but in reality for herself and others) a diamond necklace owned by the Parisian jewelry firm Boehmer and Bassenge. Among the Center's Diamond Necklace Affair papers are manuscript notes, memoirs, and letters by the Comtesse in which she attempts to discredit others and depict herself as a victim of circumstance. Additionally, there are letters and documents by others involved or implicated in the scandal, such as her husband, the Comte de La Motte, who took the necklace to England where it was broken up and sold and Count Alexander Cagliostro (1743-1795), upon whom the Comtesse tried to lay the blame for the whole affair. There are also retained copies of letters and documents that the firm Boehmer and Bassenge sent to Queen Marie-Antoinette (1755-1793), first requesting payment for the necklace and, later, when the intrigue came to light, setting out the details of their contract. The collection is complemented by nearly sixty-five volumes in the Ransom Center's book collection relating to the Diamond Necklace Affair, many of them published contemporaneously with the event.
A collection of nearly three hundred items relating to Napoléon I (1769-1821) includes not only manuscript letters, but also cartoons, prints, engravings, and other ephemera which make it an unusually rich archive for historical research. Printed materials in the collection include the original edition of the Civil Code of Napoléon (1804); the original edition of Code Napoléon (1807), and the original edition of the French Civil Code in English. There are biographies of Napoléon and other figures of the era as well as published extracts, documents, letters, and other writings by Bonaparte himself. Some of the more unusual pieces associated with the collection are snuffboxes, Napoléon's death mask, and a lock of his hair. In recent times, the later has been tested to determine the actual cause of Napoléon's death.
Among the Napoléon manuscripts is a collection of about one hundred letters, ranging in date from 1786 to 1822 and mostly unpublished, from Robert Stewart Viscount Castlereagh (the Second Marquess of Londonderry) (1769-1822) principally to his brother, Charles Stewart (1778-1854), who later became the Third Marquess of Londonderry. Until his suicide, Castlereagh had held the positions of Chief Secretary for Ireland, War Minister, and Foreign Minister during the Napoleonic Wars.
The Napoléon I collection is supplemented by other Napoleonic materials in the Parsons Library and the papers of Princess Bibesco (1886-1973).
Items pertaining to The Dreyfus Affair, including one-hundred-sixty-five books, fifteen bound volumes of newspapers or magazines, a number of letters, and two original drawings of courtroom events, relate to the trial of a French soldier, Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935), who was wrongly accused and found guilty of treason. The Dreyfus manuscripts (some from the Carlton Lake collection and others from the archive assembled by Ferdinand Forzinetti (1839-1909), commandant of Cherche-Midi military prison where Dreyfus was first held), provide important details and accounts of the history of this event and range in date from about the time of the first trial in 1894 to July 8, 1906, four days before the Court of Appeal's momentous decision to annul Dreyfus's original sentence. Among them are an important letter from Dreyfus to Paul Appell, one of the experts appointed by the court, concerning the bordereau; a letter of major importance for the history of the Dreyfus Affair from Major Esterhazy, written on the eve of the opening of the Appeal; and a letter from Gabriel Monod to Dreyfus's lawyer giving important details concerning the revelation that the Government's key document was a forgery. Other letters from the principal cast of characters round out the historical picture. The collection contains an original, eye-witness color drawing by Paul Renouard (1845-1924) of the trial, sixty-nine postcards, and ten issues of L'Aurore carrying Zola's original articles about the Affair, including his famous J'accuse, in large, broadside format.
A collection of original drawings made by cartoonists and artists during the Paris Commune (1871) shows one aspect of the aftermath to France's defeat in the Franco-German War and the fall of Napoleon III's Second Empire (1852-1870). Republican Parisians formed the Commune government, but they were unable to organize militarily and, hence, when Government troops marched into Paris on May 21st they were easily crushed during the semaine sanglante, or "bloody week," that followed. The Gernsheim Collection of Photography contains a highly important group of fifty-five albumen photographs from April and May of 1871, which document the Paris Commune history. Three other albums in the Photography Collection contain albumen prints depicting the Franco-German War and the collapse of the Commune. In the Art Collection, a portion of the large Alvin and Ethel Romansky Collection is devoted to the political aspects of the Paris Commune and contains original drawings and prints, many of them caricatures and satirical cartoons, relating to the 1871 Siege of Paris.
Original photographs document and interpret the life and culture of the country, including such important series as the key portraits found in the Galerie Contemporaire, and the historic events and views recorded during the Franco-Prussian War and the subsequent collapse of the Paris Commune. Among the key photographers represented in the collection are the Nadars (père, 1820-1910, and fils, 1856-1939), Achille Quinet (d. 1900), Andre-Adolphe-Eugène Disderi (1819-1889?), Eugène Atget (1857?-1927), and Henri Cartier-Bresson (b. 1908).
Italian
The Medici Collection of three hundred books and one hundred law edicts were collected by the Medici family between 1500 and 1800. The edicts, enacted by Medici Dukes and Grand Dukes, trace the activities of the government of Tuscany from its beginnings in 1535 to its demise in 1745. The books range in date from 1501 to the middle of the 18th century and illustrate literary, artistic, historic, and scientific developments in Italy, with particular emphasis on Renaissance works in first and later editions. The Ranuzzi Manuscript Collection was amassed by a noble family prominent in the academic and political life of Bologna from the beginning of the fifteenth century; it consists of over fifty-three hundred manuscripts, broadsides, maps, engravings, and watercolor and ink illustrations, covering three centuries (1400-1700) and ranging over such subjects as literature, history, science, law, geography, and numismatics. Included in the collection are documents chronicling relations of the Italian states with neighboring European sovereignties, as well as between the Papal states and the Dukes of Tuscany. Unpublished manuscripts in the Ranuzzi Collection are various and fascinating, ranging from the "Cronaca Universale di Fra Calisto Farnesio Piacentino," a world history up to 1493 written in Latin, to "De Electricitate" (1755), a scientific paper by an unidentified author.
Gino Speranza's (1872-1922) collection of Italo-American books covers topics such as Italian exploration in the New World, Italian histories of the English colonies in North America, America's War of Independence, and American influences in the Risorgimento. The archive of Arthur Livingston (1885-1944) facilitates an understanding of the development of the Fascist movement in Italy, and in particular the American attitude towards Fascism.
Mexican
Most of the Mexican materials at The University of Texas at Austin are located in the Benson Library. However, the Ransom Center has four hundred autograph letters between Ferdinand Maximilian (1832-1867), Emperor of Mexico, and his wife, the Empress Carlota (1840-1927), most written in German and many unpublished that reveal the devotion of this couple to one another. The correspondence spans the years 1856 to 1867, providing a personal and historical documentation of the era. Early letters are written during the couple's engagement; the last few are written shortly before Maximilian's execution in Queretaro in 1867. Insight comes from both the Emperor and the Empress into the political situation in Mexico, the precariousness of the Empire, and the controversy with the church, the Mexican landowners, and the Juarez revolution.
Present in the Center's Photography Collection are two hundred dramatic images from the Mexican Revolution, as well as the photographs and writings of W.D. Smithers (1895-1981), depicting daily life in the trans-Pecos area and Mexico early in the twentieth century.
Middle Eastern, Asian & African
Of note among the Ransom Center's African and Middle Eastern materials are the major works of poet and scholar Sir William Jones (1746-1794) and early rare volumes of his Asiatick Researches (1788), furnishing evidence of the interactions between Englishmen and Indians in the eighteenth century; the Description de l'Egypte (1809-1822; 19 volumes), prepared by a group of artists and archeologists accompanying Napoleon's military expedition of 1798; and David Roberts' (1796-1864) The Holy Land and Egypt and Nubia, elaborate ventures of nineteenth-century publishing that provide the most truthful and complete pictorial description of Palestine and Egypt possible before photographically illustrated books.
A number of early photographic images by such artists as Joseph-Philbert Girault de Prangey (1804-1892) and John Shaw Smith (1811-1873) reflect the pictorial and topographical treatment of Africa throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. Additionally, there are numerous, important publications with photographic illustrations, including multi-volume sets compiled by photographers such as Frances Frith (1822-1898) and Maxime Du Camp (1822-1894). The vast correspondence file of writer Freya Stark (1893-1993) with fellow Orientalists dates from her travels in the Middle East during the 1930s through the 1960s. (See also materials related to T.E. Lawrence, above.)
For further study, the Asian and Middle East Collections at the Perry-Castañeda Library contain substantial materials on the humanities and social sciences of the Orient, India, and the Islamic world, most in original languages.
Russian & Soviet
The archive of Alexander Kerensky (1881-1970) includes documents of the Socialist Revolutionary Party of 1917, as well as Kerensky's correspondence, manuscripts, diaries, files, clippings, posters, family correspondence, and original photographs. Among the most notable photos are a number made at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth century of pre-Revolutionary Tashkent, where Kerensky's father collected them during his years as a school administrator for the Tsar. With these items are letters concerning émigré political organizations and publications.
Chronicling life during the Russian Revolution, the unpublished diary of British army officer George Nathaniel Nash, "From Palace to Prison" (1917-1919), relates Nash's military involvement, which culminated in his imprisonment. A collection of letters written home to New York (1917-1920) byWalter S. Crosley (1871-1939), naval attaché at Petrograd during the Revolution, and from his wife Pauline, provide details about daily life during this period.
The papers of the journalist Elias Tobenkin (1882-1963) relate to the Soviet Union's foreign policy between the wars, and comprise twenty-five hundred pamphlets, books, periodicals, newspapers, and photographs depicting the government's aims and policies between 1916 and 1945. (Tobenkin's books are held at the Perry-Castañeda Library). The Philip J. Jaffe Collection of Radical Literature contains fifteen thousand books, pamphlets, and periodicals, most of which concern the rise of Communism and Socialism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. Other Russian-Slavic documents include the correspondence of the Poutiatine family (1890s-1910s), nearly all in English, apparently written after a move from Russia to Great Britain; photographs and stereographs of the Russo-Japanese War; Roger Fenton's (1819-1869) complete portfolio of photographs of the Crimean War; and a collection of fifteen hundred books, pamphlets, and newspapers on Czechoslovakian and Balkan topics.
Southwest Pacific & Australian
The C. Hartley Grattan Collection of Southwest Pacificana is the foremost collection on Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands in the United States. It contains more than twenty thousand books, pamphlets, and periodicals, as well as photographs. The collection, along with Grattan's manuscripts, letters, and personal papers, reflects the career of this economist, literary critic, historian, sociologist, and political scientist who sought to understand all facets of Australian culture from the late 1920s through the 1960s.
The R. Guy Howarth (1906-1974) papers reflect Howarth's interests in Elizabethan and twentieth-century English, American, Australian and South African literature. Howarth was a founding editor of Southerly.
Spanish
Among Spanish items at the Ransom Center are over two hundred mammoth photographs taken by the official court photographer Charles Clifford (ca. 1800-1863) in the course of amassing his photographic record of the nation and its people. The Spanish Civil War Collection (1936-1939) was assembled by Paul Patrick Rogers, an anti-Falangist American who toured Republican-controlled portions of Spain in 1937. During his travels, Rogers collected items relating to the war, including books, journals, newspapers, photographs, and posters. The books include literature produced by both the Republicans and the Falangists during and after the war. Of special interest are works by leading Spanish intellectuals, such as Salvador de Madariaga y Rojo (1886-1978), who were supporters of the Loyalist cause. The Falangists are well represented in the collection, with works by José Antonio Primo de Rivera (1903-1936), the movement's founder, and speeches of Franciso Franco (1892-1975). Additional items relating to the Spanish Civil War can be found in the Nancy Cunard, Ernest Hemingway, and Christopher Caudwell papers. On a related note, the Rex Smith collection contains a large number of books relating to Spanish bullfighting.
