“The United States is the most religiously diverse nation in the world,” writes Diana Eck in her pathbreaking work “A New Religious America.” After the Immigration Act of 1965 eliminated the quotas linking immigration to national origins, diverse peoples from across the globe have come to call America home.
Core Collections
Genealogy and Local History
The Newberry has been actively collecting genealogy and local history materials since 1887.
Music
The Newberry collects on western European music to the early 20th century, American music to the mid-20th, and on musical life in Chicago.
Manuscripts and Archives
The Newberry has a rich collection of manuscripts ranging from medieval Books of Hours to twentieth-century scrapbooks and letters.
American Indian and Indigenous Studies
As a collection of Americana, the Edward E. Ayer Collection is one of the best in the country and one of the strongest collections on American Indians.
From the Stacks
John Adams Letter
In the early spring of 1788, John Adams returned from Europe, where he’d spent a decade conducting diplomatic business. He arrived in Massachusetts at a seminal moment; he was stateside, acclimating to his Braintree home, when the U.S. Constitution was formally ratified.
May Day
This bilingual broadside, written by labor activist Adolph Fischer, calls on “workingmen” to attend a rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. In the demonstration’s aftermath, eight anarchists (including Fischer) were unfairly accused of slaying police officers. An openly biased judge sentenced seven of these defendants—known as the Haymarket martyrs—to death; the eighth was sentenced to 15 years in prison. In 1887, four were executed, after one committed suicide.