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The collection consists of materials used by Frederick Fried in his research and writing about folk art and material culture, especially related to Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York. A significant portion of the collection consists of the personal archive of William F. Mangels, which was purchased by Fried in 1955. Mangels was a designer and manufacturer of amusement rides and founder of the American Museum of Public Recreation at Coney Island. Subjects include amusement parks, amusement rides, architecture, bathing pavilions, beaches, beauty contests, carousels, carousel animals, Brooklyn, coin-operated machines, Coney Island, exhibitions, games of chance and skill, hotels, mechanical rides, mechanization, parades, pleasure railways, recreation, roller coasters, sideshows, transportation, and other subjects related to American material culture and popular amusement.

A small group of materials documenting the history of Letchworth Village, an institutional care facility for children and adults with intellectual disabilities and neurodevelopmental conditions which operated in Thiells, New York from 1911 until 1996. The materials were collected by the writer Annette Riley Fry in the 1970s, while conducting research for a possible article on Letchworth Village.

Caroline Worth Pinkham (1897-1984) was a UTS alumna 1933-1935, the first woman to receive a Ph.D. from Columbia and Union Theological Seminary in the History and Comparative Study of Religion, and a writer whose several years of living in India in the early 1920s and interest in women's status in scripture influenced much of her work. This collection contains a manuscript autobiography that includes correspondence and photographs, and manuscripts of a number of published and unpublished works by Pinkham.

Joseph Elliot Slater was an American economist, internationalist and intellectual entrepreneur born in 1922. He died in 2002 of Parkinson's disease. Over the course of his lifetime, Slater was involved in a number of corporations, institutes, and government committees. From 1944-1954 he held a number of crucial post-war positions related to the denazification of Germany and the Allied High Commission. Throughout the twentieth century he worked as an economist and director of international affairs at a number of corporations including Creole Petroleum, the Ford Foundation and Volvo North America. While at the Ford Foundation Slater went on two details to work for the Executive Branch; first, as the Secretary for President Eisenhower's Commision on Foreign Assistance (the Draper Committee), and second, as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Education and Cultural Affairs during the Kennedy administration. Slater served as the President and the CEO of the Salk Institute from 1967-1972 and held the same positions at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies from 1969-1986. After leaving the Aspen Institute, Slater served as the Chairman of the John J. McCloy International Center. In the final decade of his life Slater served as a trustee and member of the board of directors for a number of organizations related to education, science, the arts, and foreign relations. The material in this collection includes files and items from all of these eras of Slater's professional life. While much of this collection is related to Slater's various professional roles, there are personal files interspersed throughout the collection.

This collection documents Richard B. Scandrett, Jr.'s service as a member of the Allied Reparations Commission in 1945 and chief of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration Mission to Byelorussia, 1946.

Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff (d. 1949) was a Greek-Armenian philosopher who lived and taught his "fourth way" in France. He was born sometime between 1866 and 1877 in Alexandropol, Armenia, which was then a governorate of the Russian Empire. After 1912, he began to instruct a group of students on esoteric knowledge (the source of which he never revealed but which he allegedly garnered after extensive travel throughout Asia), turning these into a type of philosophical system that today could be described as "self-help." After relocating to France, he established the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, began writing his manuscripts, and engaged students in sacred music and "movements." He gathered a significant following of writers, artists, and other members of the intelligentsia from the 1920s-1940s, including this collection's co-creators, namely P.D. Ouspensky, Alfred R. Orage, and Solita Solano. Gurdjieff wrote three volumes explaining his system, which were published posthumously. Applicable to architectural researchers are Gurdjieff and Olgivanna Lloyd Wright's life-long relationship. Olgivanna lived and studied at the Institute for a number of years before immigrating to the United States. She structured much of the life at Taliesin around Gurdjieff's philosophy, and the group often performed his "movements."

These records contain information related to the formation of Robert College (Bebek, Turkey). They document the founders' attempts to define the mission of a Christian college within the Ottoman Empire, their efforts to obtain permission to purchase land, and their efforts to gain necessary permits to build upon the site.

This collection consists of materials from the Barnard College McIntosh Activities Council.