“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
Maps, Travel, and Exploration
The Newberry houses an extraordinary collection of over 500,000 maps and sources relating to the history and culture of travel.
Religion
The Newberry collection for religion focuses on sources from Europe and the Americas, from the late Middle Ages through the early 20th century.
Manuscripts and Archives
The Newberry has a rich collection of manuscripts ranging from medieval Books of Hours to twentieth-century scrapbooks and letters.
Medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern Studies
A collection rich in printed and manuscript sources from 1300 to 1800, with strengths in Western Europe and the Americas.
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.