As a collection of general Americana, the Newberry’s Edward E. Ayer Collection is one of the best in the country and one of the strongest collections on American Indians in the world.
In 1911, Edward E. Ayer (1841-1927) donated more than 17,000 pieces on the early contacts between American Indians and Europeans. Ayer, a member of the first Board of Trustees, was the first donor of a great collection to the Newberry. Since then, the Ayer endowment fund has enabled the library to collect in excess of 130,000 volumes, over one million manuscript pages, 2,000 maps, 500 atlases, 11,000 photographs, and 3,500 drawings and paintings on the subject.
The D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies enacts programming, including fellowships and seminars, that allows participants to draw from the Newberry’s collections in their research. Newberry librarians have compiled Research Guides containing bibliographies, checklists, and other resources helpful in directing research in certain subjects at the Newberry; several guides are listed below.
The Ayer collection is rich in printed and manuscript accounts of the discovery, exploration, and settlement of the Americas. While the nucleus of the Ayer collection consists of an extensive body of literature that concerns the American Indian directly, there are five main subject areas within Ayer:
- Native American Archaeology, Ethnology, Art, and Language
- History of the Contact between Europeans and Native Peoples
- Voyages, Travels, and Accounts of Early America
- Development of Cartography of the Western Hemisphere
- Philippine and Hawaiian History: the history of the aboriginal peoples under the jurisdiction of the US in the Philippine Islands and Hawaii
There are also two research guides, edited by Gabriel Angulo, that are available for those interested in the colonial Spanish sources for Indian Ethnohistory and Indian Linguistics at the Newberry. See also Modern Editions of Colonial Spanish Sources for Indian Ethnohistory. Related guides also include American Indian History bibliographical guide, and such subject areas as Latin American History, Portuguese and Brazilian History, Philippine History, and French in the Americas.
Ayer collection acquisitions are listed in the Newberry’s Online Catalog and in WorldCat. In addition, Ayer collection acquisitions to 1978 are described in the Dictionary Catalog of the Edward E. Ayer Collection of Americana and American Indians (21 volumes, 1961-1980). The Newberry also maintains three relevant digital collections: the Ayer Art Digital Collection, Great Lakes Digital Collection, and North American Indian Photographs Collection.
Read about the modest beginnings of this great collection in Edward E. Ayer’s “How I Bought My First Book”.