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Approximately 12,000 letters to Allan Nevins from various correspondents including James Truslow Adams, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Willa Cather, Frances Folsom Cleveland, Van Wyck Brooks, Robert Frost, Newton D. Baker, Archibald MacLeish, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Carl Sandburg, and Henry Wallace; notes and typescripts for Nevins' books including Emergence of Lincoln, The Ordeal of Democracy, Rockefeller, and History and Historians, with notes by editor Ray A. Billington; miscellaneous transcripts, clippings, newspapers, and photographs. Also, autograph letters and manuscripts by presidents, Civil War figures, financiers, politicians, and authors. There are also the Brand Whitlock World War I Diaries and letters to him by such people as Herbert Hoover, Gen. John J. Pershing, and others.

Material gathered by Oswald Garrison Villard in the researches for his biography JOHN BROWN, 1800-1859: A BIOGRAPHY FIFTY YEARS AFTER. A large part of the materials is copies of correspondence both contemporary and of a later period, concerning John Brown and his associates, especially in the Kansas Territory and at the Harper's Ferry raid. Of the original letters in the collection, many are from descendants and family of John Brown and the men who accompanied him on his raid. There are clippings, pamphlets, proof sheets, and other printed matter. Photographs number 181 items.