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Paul Channing Jefferson papers
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Held at: Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections [Contact Us]370 Lancaster Ave, Haverford, PA 19041
This is a finding aid. It is a description of archival material held at the Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections. Unless otherwise noted, the materials described below are physically available in their reading room, and not digitally available through the web.
Overview and metadata sections
Paul Channing Jefferson (1944-2022) was associate professor emeritus of history at Haverford College where he taught for nearly thirty years. Jefferson earned both his B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he won the Graduate Prize Fellowship. He also studied at the University of Ghana, researching W.E.B. Du Bois. Jefferson was selected for a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Paris in 1967, but turned it down to become associate director of the Yale Summer High School. He was a teaching fellow at Harvard, a lecturer at Babson College, and an instructor at the Commonwealth School in Boston before joining the Haverford faculty in 1981.
Jefferson was a scholar who specialized in 19th- and 20th-century intellectual history. He taught classes on American intellectual history, African-American intellectual history, and African-American political and social thought, among others. From 1984 through the late 1990s, he was the coordinator for the College's African American Studies Concentration, now called African and Africana Studies. He published on Black public intellectuals, including Du Bois, William Wells Brown, and Haverford's first tenured Black professor, Ira de Augustine Reid. In 1983, he was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship award from the National Research Council for his research on the history of Black sociology. In 1988, he won the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation Teaching Fellowship. Jefferson retired in 2010.
This collection contains the papers of Paul Channing Jefferson, associate professor emeritus of history at Haverford College. These papers include manuscript and published materials pertaining to Jefferson's scholarship, course materials, and Jefferson's doctoral thesis.
The first series in this collection is Jefferson's scholarship on African-American sociology and consists primarily of chapter drafts that engage with a wide range of primary and secondary sources on African-American sociology and African-American intellectual history. The work treats a number of major figures and institutions, include W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles S. Johnson, George Edmund Haynes, and Fisk University.
The collection also contains materials related to the creation of the
Encyclopaedia Africana and Jefferson's engagement with the project. It contains some of his published and manuscript scholarly writings, including his 1976 dissertation entitled "Pragmatism and the Logic of Meaning," completed as part of his doctoral work at Harvard University.The final series in this collection consists of materials pertaining to Jefferson's teaching, both before and after coming to Haverford College. This series contains course descriptions, syllabi, lecture notes, and related materials.
Gift of Lydia Quill, July 2023
Processed by Elizabeth Jones-Minsinger, completed August 2023.
People
- Quill, Lydia
- Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963
- Haynes, George Edmund, 1880-1960
- Johnson, Charles Spurgeon, 1893-1956
- Smith, James McCune, 1813-1865
- Reid, Ira De Augustine
Organization
Subject
- Publisher
- Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections
- Finding Aid Author
- Elizabeth Jones-Minsinger
- Finding Aid Date
- August, 2023
- Access Restrictions
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This collection is open for research use.
- Use Restrictions
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Standard Federal Copyright Law Applies (U.S. Title 17)
Collection Inventory
This series contains several drafts of a book manuscript by Paul C. Jefferson on African-American sociology. The drafts consist of chapter outlines containing detailed analysis of primary and secondary sources. Most of the materials are undated. Two progress reports to the Fellowship Office of the National Research Council from 1984 and 1985 suggest that Jefferson conducted substantial research for this project in the mid 1980s, while the publication dates of several secondary sources discussed in the drafts indicate that Jefferson continued to work on the project at least until the early 1990s. Major figures treated in this manuscript include George Edmund Haynes, Charles S. Johnson, and W.E.B. Du Bois.
This file contains two progress reports submitted by Paul C. Jefferson to the Fellowship Office of the National Research Council providing updates on his research on Black sociology. These reports suggest that Jefferson completed significant work on his manuscript in the mid 1980s.
This file contains organizational documents and a prospectus on "The Encyclopaedia Africana" as well as correspondence from Joel Motley to Paul Jefferson about the encyclopedia.
This file contains Jefferson's writings on Black philosophy, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s "Encyclopedia Africana," W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles S. Johnson, James McCune Smith, Ira De Augustine Reid, and Hampton Institute.
This series includes course descriptions, syllabi, lecture notes, and other materials related to Paul Channing Jefferson's teaching at the Commonwealth School, Haverford College, and other institutions. Apart from the "Course descriptions and syllabi" file, Jefferson's original folder names have been maintained.