The Historical Society of Pennsylvania is one of the largest family history libraries in the nation, has excellent collections on local and regional history, and offers a manuscript collection renowned for its 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century holdings. The Balch Institute’s merger with HSP in 2002 (and those of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania in 2006 through a Strategic Alliance Agreement), HSP is now also one of the nation’s leading repositories of ethnic and immigrant studies materials. HSP houses some 600,000 books, pamphlets, serials, and microfilm reels; 20 million manuscripts; and over 300,000 graphics items, making it one of the nation’s largest non-governmental repositories of documentary materials.
HSP holds many national treasures, such as the first draft of the United States Constitution, an original printer’s proof of the Declaration of Independence, and the earliest surviving American photograph. But the true strength of our collection is the overall breadth and depth of materials that together offer a rich, complex portrait of U.S. history and society from the 17th century to the present.
HSP's Collections Management Policy (latest version approved by the Board of Councilors on November 23, 2015) is available online.
Types of Materials
HSP’s collections include a number of different types of materials: