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Papers of the Jay family and of those families related to the Jay family, including Bruen, Butterworth, Chapman, Clarkson, Dawson, Du Bois, Field, Iselin, McVickar, Mortimer, O'Kill, Pellew, Pierrepont, Prime, Robinson, Schieffelin, Von Schweinitz, Sedgwick, and Wurts. In addition to family and personal matters, the correspondence deals with anti-slavery, New York State civil service, repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the Civil War, the Blair Bill, international affairs, and New York City and State politics and government. There are letters from numerous prominent persons including George Bancroft, F.A.P. Barnard, Bismarck, William Cullen Bryant, Aaron Burr, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hamilton Fish, Albert Gallatin, Horace Greeley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Washington Irving, Frances Anne Kemble, Jenny Lind, Henry W. Longfellow, Seth Low, James Russell Lowell, John Stuart Mill, Alice Duer Miller, Clement Clarke Moore, J.P. Morgan, Thomas Nast, Commodore Matthew Perry, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Carl Schurz, William H. Seward, William T. Sherman, Charles Sumner, and John Greenleaf Whittier.

Correspondence, minutes, reports, documents, scrapbooks, publications, memorabilia, and photographs. The general files, minutes, and reports reflect the varied activities and interests of the League, including apportionment, court reform, education, and voting rights. The historical files contain photographs, printed materials, and memorabilia, filed chronologically. Also included are the periodicals and publications of the League, scrapbooks arranged chronologically, and "Mailbooks", or volumes of mimeographed reports and announcements which were sent to branches and board members. Among the major correspondentrs are: Thomas E. Dewey, Herbert H. Hehman, Nelson A. Rockefeller, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Alfred Smith

The collection includes seven volumes of scrapbooks containing clippings on current affairs roughly between 1939 and 1950 with particular reference to the trials of the German War Criminals at Nuremberg and the state of Germany after World War II. Also, general items on President Franklin Roosevelt and U.S. foreign policy. There are several complete copies of newspapers folded and inserted in the scrapbooks. The second and more important part of the collection consists of typescripts of Dr. Pfeiffenberger's writings. These occupy one and one-half manuscript boxes (Boxes 4 and 5). Included are about 45 pages of poetry in German, about 120 pages of selected stories of New York Life (in German), about 30 pages on The European State-System, 1848-1890 (in German), 127 pages of manuscript entitled "The Spirit of the Code of Hammurabi" (this is a preliminary draft in English of a short book or article by Pfeiffenberger), about 305 pages of typescript on "Compensation in the Western Zone of Germany" by Pfeiffenberger, Dr. H. Klein, and Dr. Klavehn-Berndt (there are many changes and notes in script, and this item is accompanied by another typescript of approximately the same size on the same subject), and several other items.