Chitwood, Oliver Perry, 1874-1971

Overview

Material written and collected by a former curator of the West Virginia and Regional History Collection that includes bibliographies, transcripts, photostats, papers and historical sketches on various aspects of West Virginia history. Items deal with prominent West Virginia University historians, the Civil War, early settlement, industrial growth, and West Virginia University. A number of letters and circulars discuss the West Virginia Historical Society in 1869.

Overview

Records of an association of Johns Hopkins alumni at West Virginia University, including two minute books, 1913-1924 and 1925-1958. Members include J.M. Callahan, O.P. Chitwood, Friend E. Clark, and A.M. Reese.

Overview The minute books of Morgantown's First Baptist Church. The books chart the growth and change of this locally noted church of the regular Baptist denomination. The books contain church covenants, membership lists, statistics, treasurer reports, church committee, society and officer reports, correspondence, and Sunday school records. Mention is made of the establishment of a mission by the church in Sabraton and of a missionary effort to the local Italian-American community. Prominent members...

Overview Correspondence, research notes, and manuscripts of a professor of history at West Virginia University (1907-1946), professor emeritus (1946-1971), and author of several college history textbooks and biographies. Subjects include book publishing, newspaper and magazine articles, correspondence with legislators and congressmen, personal correspondence, former students, and the Democratic Convention delegate selection in 1928. Also included are materials on Chitwood's books JOHN TYLER: CHAMPION...

Overview

Research notes and copies of the correspondence of John Tyler collected by Oliver Perry Chitwood for his biography, "John Tyler, Champion of the Old South" (1939), from manuscripts in private collections and the New York Public Library, Huntington Library, and Duke University Library.

Overview Record book, photo and certificate of the West Virginia University Alpha chapter of a national honorary fraternity, Phi Beta Kappa. A chapter charter was granted only to those institutions whose standards measured up to a high scholastic ideal. The fraternity's purpose being to undertake to conserve the influences that were restored and liberated by the Renaissance, specifically those influences that refine and humanize mankind. Membership was open to those undergraduate seniors in the top...

Scope and Contents

Records of the WVU Department of History, consisting of applications for positions, invoices, purchase records, material on the Army Special Training Program, and faculty material such as grade books, exams, lecture notes, and course outlines.

Scope and Contents

Contemporary manuscripts containing list of alumni and students who served in U.S. forces, Army, Navy, Marine Corps, with rank, branch etc. Also comment written ten years after war; a memorial address by President Frank B. Trotter; tribute to alumni in war by John Harrington Cox, C. R. Jones, Robert A. Armstrong, O. P. Chitwood, C. W. Waggoner, C. Edmund Neil, et al.

Scope and Contents

Historical narrative about West Virginia University history professors James Morton Callahan, Charles Henry Ambler, Oliver Perry Chitwood, and Wilson Porter Shortridge, authored by William D. Barns and given as a speech to the History Club and Phi Alpha Theta at West Virginia University on November 20, 1974. Includes one photocopy of the handwritten speech and one typescript transcription.

Overview Civil War materials collected by Dr. Brooks in writing his biographies of Grant and Lee. Included are pamphlets, scrapbooks, newspapers, photographs, and originals and copies of soldiers' letters, journals, and military reports. There are typed copies of a journal, 3 November-2 December 1863, of a civilian observer in Tennessee, who was at Grant's headquarters at the Battle of Chattanooga; letters, 1861-1864, of William Ludwig, a private in the Thirty-fourth Ohio Volunteer Infantry in...