Few, if any, archival resources can claim as complete and wide-ranging a documentary record for American academic publishing in the social sciences over the past half century than the Irving Louis Horowitz-Transaction Publishers Archives, 1939-2009. According to William L. Joyce, Penn State's Dorothy Foehr Huck chair and head of special collections, "This archive of well over 100 cubic feet of materials documents the expansion of social science research and publication from the 1960s into the first decade of the 21st century as it also illustrates the widening focus of the social sciences on important public policy issues."
The archive is newly opened for public research use at Penn State's Historical Collections and Labor Archives (HCLA) of The Eberly Family Special Collections Library, University Libraries. Researchers worldwide can obtain more information and access digitized copies of the majority of the archive through the Libraries’ website at http://publications.libraries.psu.edu/coll/transaction online.
A gift from Irving Louis Horowitz and the Board of Directors of Transaction Publishers, the archive documents the corporate history and editorial stewardship of one of the leading international social sciences publishing houses. Horowitz, chairman of the board of Transaction Publishers and Hannah Arendt distinguished professor of sociology and political science at Rutgers University, was a principal founder of Transaction Publishers. The collection also includes a small but significant collection of papers by and about C. Wright Mills (1916-1962), the author of the critical works "The Power Elite" (1956) and "The Sociological Imagination" (1959).
"I am delighted that the Penn State University Libraries can make the Transaction Archive and its associated collections available online to scholars worldwide," said Nancy L. Eaton, dean of University Libraries and Scholarly Communications. "This archive will be very important to the study of the social sciences as a discipline and provides correspondence and papers of many notable scholars of the era."
"The files contain correspondence of distinguished social scientists, including Daniel Bell, Alvin Gouldner, and David Riesman, and academics, such as Peter Drucker, and represent the maturation of social science research as it was reflected through the impressive publication record of Transaction Publishers," Joyce added. "There also is an extensive file of the writings of Horowitz, and a smaller cache of material by and about the iconic American sociologist, C. Wright Mills, used by Horowitz in his biography, "C. Wright Mills, An American Utopian," published in 1983."
Spanning nearly a half-century, the bulk of the archives contains the integrated correspondence of Horowitz in his several capacities as head of Transaction Publishers, scholarly press editor, professor of sociology, and distinguished social sciences researcher and author. From modest beginnings in 1962 as a grant-funded initiative to publish the groundbreaking social science magazine Transaction: Social Science and Modern Society -- later Society -- the Transaction Publishers grew to become the “Publisher of Record in International Social Science.”
Containing more than 5,500 titles in its extensive catalog, Transaction Publishers covered the traditional disciplines of sociology, psychology, anthropology, history, economics and political science, and promoted the growth of interdisciplinary research by publishing in the emerging fields of urban studies, organizational culture and behavior, public policy analysis, criminology, ethnic studies, feminism and women’s studies, and the philosophy of the social sciences.
The corporate archives and editorial record of Horowitz cast a wide shadow over the historical development of the social sciences in the late 20th century. Operating in a time of intense intellectual and political debate over critical social issues of the day and bridging academe and scholarly publishing, Transaction Publishers served as a nexus for advancing and disseminating contemporary developments in social science theory.
As an editor and scholar Horowitz had wide-ranging academic interests and corresponded with a diverse group of influential scholars, intellectuals, politicians, statesmen and significant figures in arts and culture. Notable correspondents include Seymour Martin Lipset, C. Wright Mills, Robert Merton, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, David Riesman, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Murio Bunge, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Walter Laqueur, Thomas Szasz, Richard Hoggart, William Donohue and Henry Kissinger. Researchers interested in social and intellectual biography will find the archives invaluable.
The collection is organized into three series: The first and largest, the Transaction Publishers Archives consists mainly of editorial and scholarly correspondence. An alphabetical name index identifies letter writers in the earliest years, 1958-1965. The remainder of this series consists of marketing materials; photographs, mainly of contributors to Transaction magazine; and papers of the sociologist Cesar Grana, acquired in preparation for Transaction editions of his writings (111 cubic feet and 45 images).
The Irving Louis Horowitz Academic Papers comprise the second series, and includes academic correspondence and personal papers that Horowitz separated from the main run of Transaction correspondence, typescripts by Horowitz and related research files, and copies of his publications. The typescripts and publications are keyed to "Once More Unto the Breach, Dear Friends: Incomplete Theory and Complete Bibliography of Irving Louis Horowitz on the Occasion of his 75th Birthday," compiled by Andrew McIntosh, Patrick Ivins and Deborah A. Berger (2005; updated electronic edition, 2007). Unpublished writings that did not make their way into that bibliography appear in appropriate chronological positions within these runs of typescripts and publications (10 cubic feet).
A third series combines the papers of C. Wright Mills with Horowitz’s papers on Mills. Horowitz edited several posthumous collections of Mills’ works and authored "C. Wright Mills: an American Utopian" in 1983. This collection includes correspondence with Mills and about Mills; typescripts, research files and books by Mills; and typescripts, research files and books on Mills by Horowitz and others. Though it is the smallest of the three series (four cubic feet) it will be an important resource for Mills scholars.
The Libraries acquired the collection in 2006 and soon embarked upon a comprehensive project to process, arrange and describe the Irving Louis Horowitz-Transaction Publishers Archives. Penn State Special Collections staff, working with summer graduate interns from by the Department of Sociology, undertook the physical processing and intellectual arrangement of the entire textual content of the archives. The contemporary nature of the collection required a comprehensive vetting of records and documents to identify materials, such as editorial peer reviews, that may require confidentiality.
The Libraries then began a 15-month project to digitize more than 400,000 pages from the Transaction Publishers archive and make them freely available online. Researchers worldwide can access digital images of the papers in the archive by searching for dates and names, or by searching the full-text of the documents. The Transaction Publishers archive now becomes the largest digital collection of the Penn State Libraries.
Inquiries and questions concerning the collection may be directed to James P. Quigel, Jr., head of Historical Collections and Labor Archives, The Eberly Family Special Collections Library, Penn State University, 104 Paterno Library, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802. Call 814-863-3181 or send an e-mail to jpq1@psu.edu.