One British Archive: Stocked Stacks in the Great Plains: British and Irish Collections at the University of Kansas’s Kenneth Spencer Research Library
Published in Journal of British Studies, January 2026.
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Abstract
This article discusses the University of Kansas’s Kenneth Spencer Research Library as an unexpectedly rich resource for British and Irish studies. The library’s location in Lawrence, Kansas, at a distance from the coastal research corridors, means that its collections tend to be underexplored, despite their significance. Spencer Library’s strength in eighteenth-century British imprints is complemented by extensive manuscript holdings. Among these are several centuries of estate papers for Britain’s prominent North family, and manuscripts documenting the Asiento (agreement) and England’s trade in supplying captive Africans to Spanish colonies in the Americas in the papers of Arthur Moore. Particularly noteworthy is the library of writer, civil servant, and Irish nationalist P. S. O’Hegarty, which offers scholars an unparalleled resource for Anglo-Irish relations and Irish history, culture, and politics. O’Hegarty’s collecting of scarce and ephemeral material, on the one hand, and books with significant provenance, on the other, makes his library a valuable resource for researchers even in an age of digitized text.