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The Thomas de Valcourt and Michael Lerner collection contains materials concerning 19th century New England poets and authors, most prominently Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, but also Henry David Thoreau, Washington Irving, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and minor figures. Much of the materials - which predominantly consists of prints, photographs, clippings, photocopies, newspapers, periodicals, postcards, reprints, poetry, and other formats - concerns their famous New England homes and their families' homes, and other literary landmarks in the vicinity. Most of the materials date from the late 19th and early 20th century.

Also included are a scrapbook of clippings of poetry, a 1962 plaster cast bust of Henry David Thoreau by Melvina Hoffman, an 1864 ceramic bust of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow by M. Milmore, two paperweights with depictions of the Longfellow house, a brick noted as "being used by Thoreau when adding to the family house on Virginia Road in Concord," and one copper ashtray.

The Historical Documents Collection includes letters, deeds, bonds, receipts, orders, position appointments, writings, and other documents that are individual in nature and do not belong to any particular collection. The materials represent a number of prominent figures in the areas of art, literature, music, science, scholarship, business, law, military, politics, diplomacy, and religion. The items range in date from 1642-1977, but the bulk date from the 1760s through the 1920s. Most of the materials are American in origin, although some are from Mexico and Europe, particularly Great Britain.

Individuals represented in the collection include, but are not limited to:  Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain), Charles Dickens, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Washington Irving, Aldous Huxley, Rudyard Kipling, Ezra Pound, John Muir, Sigmund Freud, and Igor Stravinsky, Benjamin Butler, James Longstreet, Edmund Gaines Pendleton, Matthew Perry, William Tecumseh Sherman, Friedrich Wilhelm August Heinrich Ferdinand von Steuben, John Quincy Adams, Napoleon Bonaparte, Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton, Jefferson Davis, Ulysses Simpson Grant, Sam Houston, Andrew Jackson, James Madison, James Oglethorpe, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Thomas Paine, Woodrow Wilson, and King Louis XVIII.