Major Gifts
The Tracy W. McGregor Library contains Americana and accounts of travel and exploration in the Western Hemisphere from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Among its holdings are large collections of the records of the North American Land Company, an important land speculation group of the colonial and early Republic period, and of British General John Forbes's service in North America during the French and Indian War. It also contains a substantial collection of material by and about the Mather family of New England, especially Increase and Cotton Mather.
The Clifton Waller Barrett Library
The Clifton Waller Barrett Library contains, as Herbert Cahoon noted for the library's dedication in 1960, "insofar as it has been possible to assemble them, all fiction, poetry, drama, and essays published by an American in book form [from 1775] up to and including the year 1875; for the years remaining [to 1950] it contains a very nearly complete collection of the works of every major American writer." The manuscript component of this library is similarly comprehensive.