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Fig. 1: Anthony F. C. Wallace
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Although the Wallace Family collection covers a surprisingly broad swath of academic turf, a set of related themes surrounding social, cultural, and technological change provide a unity in the diversity. The collection's abundance of materials cover topics ranging from Indian-white relations to industrialization, and from the early history of Pennsylvania to the biological and cultural aspects of psychiatric disorders.
Over the past year and a half, Valerie re-housed and catalogued the papers, which had arrived in three installments over several years. Originally processed as a separate collection, the Paul A.W. Wallace Papers have been incorporated with the previously unprocessed Anthony Wallace Papers to create the Wallace Family Collection, and the pair are now made available in a more reader-friendly arrangement, backed by a searchable database and extensive subject indexing.
The substantially larger Anthony Wallace Papers, at 103.5 linear feet, comprise most of the collection and document Anthony F.C. Wallace's career from 1946-1995. The papers include professional and personal correspondence and almost all of his research notes from his MA thesis "King of the Delawares: Teedyuscung" through St. Clair: A Nineteenth Century Coal Town's Experience with a Disaster-Prone Industry (1985). They also contain manuscript drafts of most of his published and unpublished writings from childhood through his most recent work Thomas Jefferson and the Indians (1999), which appears in the collection under the working title Logan's Mourner. Other notable materials include correspondence, notes, and administrative reports from Wallace's fifty-year affiliation with the University of Pennsylvania as student, professor, and chair of the anthropology department, his affiliations with numerous committees and professional societies, and his clinical research work with the Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute (Philadelphia, Pa.) The collection also features numerous photographs and maps associated with his research.
The relatively smaller Paul Wallace Papers represent 6.5 linear feet of the collection and provide rich source materials for the study of northeastern American Indians. The papers include extensive correspondence with fellow scholars and Indian consultants; field notes from work at the Six Nations Reserve in Brantford, Ontario; and notes and photographs collected during his fieldwork among the Indians of New York State, Pennsylvania, and Canada.
Wallace's work includes ethnopsychological studies of Indians, ethnohistorical community studies of industrial towns, studies of Indian-white (and Indian-U.S. government) relations, and research relating to the biological and cultural aspects of psychiatric disorders, particularly schizophrenia.
After serving in the U.S. Army during the Second World War, Wallace began a lifelong association with the University of Pennsylvania's anthropology department, of which he eventually became chair. His initial, somewhat untraditional, choice of undergraduate majors-history and physics-reflected his desire to combine humanistic studies with scientific and technological approaches to the study of man, but the evolutionary perspective of James Frazer's The Golden Bough later guided him toward the most interdisciplinary of the social sciences-anthropology.
Influenced by his father's work and his own interest in Indians, Wallace pursued graduate studies of the Delaware and Tuscarora Indians under the guidance of A. Irving Hallowell, Frank G. Speck, and Loren C. Eiseley, all direct intellectual descendants of Franz Boas. Speck had studied with Boas at Columbia, where Boas taught both Speck and Hallowell in one seminar. Speck and Eiseley, whom Speck had taught at Oberlin and brought to Penn, persuaded Hallowell, their former colleague, to return to Penn after a period at Northwestern. As an heir to the Boasian ethnographic tradition through Speck and Hallowell, Wallace inherited Boas' careful attention to methodology and his interdisciplinary conception of anthropology as encompassing physical, psychological, linguistic, and cultural studies. From his father and Speck, he inherited an interest in the rapidly disappearing cultures of the Northeastern Indians and a personal commitment to his research subjects. Through Hallowell, one of the principal figures in ethnopsychology, he learned to carefully describe behavior and psychological traits while considering the cognitive and emotional structures of his subjects. All of these he synthesized to create a unique blend of ethnology and history influenced by the social, behavioral, and biological sciences, thereby becoming one of the pioneers in the development of ethnohistory as a distinct field.
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Fig. 2: Paul A. W. Wallace
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An English professor at Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania, where he eventually became chair and spent most of his career, Wallace's interests in folklore and ethnology developed into studies of the Pennsylvania Dutch and the Indians of Pennsylvania, New York State, and Canada. The Toronto-born Wallace shared Speck's dedication to and concern for the Indians, whom he considered friends as well as ethnographic subjects. Through his extensive ethnographic fieldwork among the Iroquois and Huron tribes at the Six Nations Reserve in Brantford, Ontario and in other communities in Canada and Western New York state, Wallace forged bonds of friendship with many Indians.
Through works such as Conrad Weiser, 1696-1760, Friend of Colonist and Mohawk (Philadelphia, 1945); The White Roots of Peace (Philadelphia, 1946); The Muhlenbergs of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1950); Indian Paths of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, 1952 and subsequent editions); Thirty Thousand Miles with John Heckewelder (Pittsburgh, 1958); and Indians in Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, 1961), Wallace achieved national recognition in his second career as an historian. He served as editor of Pennsylvania History and as consultant to the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (PHMC) from 1951-1957, when the PHMC hired him as a staff historian, a position he held until 1965.
Valerie Lutz began processing the Wallace papers in August of 1999, two and a half months after she arrived at the APS as a part-time library technical assistant. Her previous archival experience includes processing and reference service at the Philadelphia City Archives and volunteer experience at the Thomas Jefferson University Archives and the National Archives Mid-Atlantic Regional Branch. In addition to an MA in American history and public history from Temple University, during which she completed three archival studies courses, she earned two BA degrees in psychology and journalism from Temple and an AA in liberal arts from Bucks County Community College. After she completes processing of the Wallace papers, she will re-process and incorporate new material into the William N. Fenton Papers, followed by a year and a half grant position in which she will rearrange and catalogue the APS prints and photographs collection.
