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 online.
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"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.
Source: Penn St. University Libraries
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