The Library purchased the titles in the McGregor Collection as a participant in the “McGregor Plan for the Encouragement of Book Collecting by American College Libraries,” a philanthropic plan that encouraged American college libraries to purchase primary source materials in the areas of discovery, the early settlement of North America, the American Revolution and the westward expansion.
Noteworthy texts include two volumes of Theodor de Bry’s influential engravings of the inhabitants of North America, a collection of Revolutionary era political pamphlets, and primary sources relating to the settlement of Minnesota and the Dakota Indian Wars of the early 1860’s.