American Indian History

Edward E. Ayer Collection

Ayer Photo 3653 [Daguerrotype]

As a collection of general Americana, the Newberry Library's Edward E. Ayer Collection is one of the best in the country and in the words of a former Yale University Library Curator, Ayer is "perhaps the finest gathering of materials 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 Library. Since then, the Ayer endowment fund has enabled the Library to collect in excess of 130,000 volumes, over 1 million manuscript pages, 2,000 maps, 500 atlases, 11,000 photographs and 3,500 drawings and paintings on the subject.

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, language
• History of Contact between Native peoples and Europeans
• History of the voyages and travels which include accounts of early America
• Development of the cartography of the Western Hemisphere
• The expanding western frontier of America: the history of the aboriginal peoples under the jurisdiction of the US in the Philippine Islands and Hawaii

Ayer collection acquisitions are listed in the Newberry's online catalog and in the WorldCat database. 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 vols., 1961-1980).

Read about the modest beginnings of this great collection in Edward E. Ayer's How I Bought My First Book.

Bibliographic Guide for American Indian History