More and Better American History

The library has recently received as a gift from David Yuengling (FS '40) a collection of more than 2,300 books, journals, and government documents reflecting the donor's interest in American colonial history, American military history, the history of New England and of the Southwest. The collection is rich in nineteenth and early twentieth century publications which will help fill serious gaps in Lauinger's holdings in these fields.

Among the considerable number of rarities in the collection are two worthy of special notice. The first edition of R. W. Surby's Grierson Raids, and Hatch's Sixty-four Days March, with Biographical Sketches, also the Life and Adventures of Chickasaw, the Scout (Chicago, 1865), is an established classic in the literature of the Civil War. The Proceedings of a Convention of Delegates . . . Convened at Hartford, in the State of Connecticut, December 15th, 1814 (Hartford, 1815) is the first published account of the now not-so-well-known but nonetheless important "Hartford Convention," at which representatives of five New England states proposed to take certain matters of governance away from Washington into their own hands. The Yuengling copy of The Proceedings is accompanied by a rare broadside speech by John Cotton Smith proposing the Hartford resolves to his state legislature.