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Anthony F. C. Wallace and Paul A. W. Wallace
In 1999, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provided a grant to facilitate the rehousing, processing, and cataloging of the Wallace Family Papers.
Paul A. W. Wallace
An historian, anthropologist, and folklorist, Paul A. W. Wallace was a long time student of the history and culture of the Indians of Pennsylvania, New York, and Canada, and had an interest in Pennsylvania Dutch culture. Spending most of his career at Lebanon Valley College where he was chair of the Department of English, Wallace was recognized for his pioneering work on Indian-white relations during the eighteenth century, and particularly for his biography, Conrad Weiser, 1696-1760, Friend of Colonist and Mohawk (Philadelphia, 1945) and his book about Iroquois traditions, The White Roots of Peace (Philadelphia, 1946).
Paul A. W. Wallace A colleague of Frank Speck, A. Irving Hallowell, and William Fenton, among others, Wallace was an active ethnologist of contemporary Native American communities, conducting fieldwork among the Iroquois and Huron tribes at the Six Nations Reserve in Brantford and in other communities in Ontario and Western New York state. He was editor of Pennsylvania History, 1951-1957; consultant to the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1951-1957; and historian on the staff of the Historical and Museum Commission, 1957-1965. Among his many publications are: The Muhlenbergs of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1950); Indian Paths of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, 1952 and subsequent editions); Thirty Thousand Miles with John Heckewelder (Pittsburgh, 1958); Indians in Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, 1961); Pennsylvania, Seed of a Nation (N.Y., 1962); and Lebanon Valley College: A Centennial History (Annville, Pa., 1966).
Paul Wallace's academic and professional career is represented in the Wallace Family Papers through 6.5 linear feet of correspondence, field notes, diaries, and photographs. His personal life is documented in the various Wallace family histories and photograph albums included among the papers of Anthony F. C. Wallace. The material here supplements the Paul Wallace Papers housed at the Pennsylvania State Archives and other repositories.
Other Repositories with Paul Wallace Papers
Anthony F. C. Wallace
The young Anthony Wallace imbibed a taste for anthropology while accompanying his father during fieldwork among the Delaware Indians and Pennsylvania Dutch during the 1930s and early 1940s. These early experiences provided the foundation for Wallace's first published article, "The Status of the Delawares in the Iroquois Confederacy," and for his masters thesis in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, which in turn became his first book, Teedyuscung, King of the Delawares (Philadelphia, 1949). Among his earliest articles were several dealing with the Handsome Lake religion of the Seneca, which he later covered in detail in his seminal work, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (1970). Wallace has returned repeatedly to the study of Iroquois, and more generally Native American history and culture, including in his most recent work Jefferson and the Indians : the Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Harvard, 1999).
Anthony F. C. Wallace Much of Wallace's research is characterized by the integration of historical, anthropological, and psychological techniques of analysis as applied to the study of culture change, to fulfill, as he once said, "the perspective on human cultural evolution that cultural anthropology made possible." In this regard, his work on the history of the Seneca and Delaware Indians is complemented by his work on culture change in white populations associated with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. In Rockdale, a Study of a Southeastern Pennsylvania Mill Community in the Early- to Mid-Nineteenth Century, Wallace examined the intricate relations between and among people and businesses of that community with an eye toward the constitutive role of technological change in social organization. For this work, he was awarded the Bancroft Prize in 1979.
His next major work, St. Clair, examined the context of culture change in a northeastern Pennsylvania coal mining town during the nineteenth century. Wallace said that he conceived of St. Clair "as a companion piece to Rockdale -- an intensive ethno-historical study of a small industrial community in which the social conflicts precipitated by industrialization can be seen in the interactions between individuals about whom we know a good deal." The exhibit featured here focuses on St. Clair and life in the Pennsylvania coal region during the nineteenth century. Among the several images included are several that Wallace took while researching his book, and others reproduced from the collections of the Historical Society of Schuylkill County.
