Correspondence
name: label: Collection Creator
content: Abbott, William Louis, 1860-1936
label: Collection Creator
content: Hough, Walter, 1859-1935
label: Collection Photographer
content: Raven, Henry Cushier, 1889-1944
label: Collection Creator
content: Kloss, Charles Boden
label: Collection Creator
content: Mason, Otis Tufton, 1838-1908
setName: label: See more items in
content: William Louis Abbott collection
unitdate: label: Date
content: 1896-1919
dataSource: label: Archival Repository
content: National Anthropological Archives
identifier: label: Identifier
content: NAA.XXXX.0228, Series 1
objectType: label: Type
content: Archival materials
scopecontent: label: Scope and Contents
content: Original handwritten documents as well as typed copies and excerpts of letters
make up this file. Most of the letters are from Abbott to Otis Mason and later to Walter
Hough. There are also some typed copies and excerpts of letters to museum officials
George Brown Goode and Frederick William True. Accession numbers penciled on the
top of typed documents refer to the registrar's accession file in which the original is
stored. These files are housed in the Smithsonian Institution Archives and microfilmed
copies are available in the Office of the Registrar in the Museum of Natural History.
Abbott's letters provide information about his collecting activities, possible plans
for future expeditions, and shipment of objects. He describes native peoples, their way of
life, customs, use of certain artifacts, food, dress, racial and physical features, character,
and intelligence. Abbott refers to the work of Elio Modigliani and W.W. Skeat,
accompaniment by Cecil Boden Kloss on expeditions, opinions of colleagues, and
various people encountered in the field. These letters are mostly from and about the
Malay region, with a few later documents to Hough concerning Haiti and Santo
Domingo.

There are four letters to Abbott from Mason and Hough, mostly about
manuscripts and work on the collections; attached to one is a rough draft of a paper on
the Haitian pree-pree (type of raft). Correspondence concerning Abbott and the Abbott
collections are generally to or from Mason or Hough. Other correspondents include
Cyrus Adler, assistant secretary of libraries and exchanges; Jesse Walter Fewkes, of the
Bureau of American Ethnology; William H. Furness, of the University of Pennsylvania;
Alfred Cort Haddon, of Cambridge, England; Ales Hrdlička, Smithsonian curator of
physical anthropology; Cecil Boden Kloss; Richard Rathbun, assistant secretary of
Smithsonian Institution; Elmer D. Merrill, of the Bureau of Science in Manila; William
Palmer, in Java; Mary Lois Kissell, of the American Museum of Natural History; Charles
Willoughby, of the Harvard Peabody Museum. They discuss proposed work on the
Abbott collections, bibliographic sources, and basketry. Correspondence with Kloss
mainly concerns publications and exchanges of photographs.

Additional correspondence is included in several of the series described below.