ACHS Historical Collections

The American Catholic Historical Society was founded with a mission to collect and preserve materials related to the history of the Catholic Church in the United States. During its early decades, its historical collections grew to include a range of materials, including books, pamphlets, newspapers, parish histories, photographs, manuscript collections, and artifacts.

Digitized Collections

The vast majority of our historical collections are housed physically and digitally at the Catholic Historical Research Center of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Villanova University has also digitized a large collection of documents that are are open to researchers. 

Historical Collections

Artifacts

The society has thousands of artifacts of historical significance that have been donated by prominent Catholics, historians, families, parishes, and many other sources. They include rare works of art, furniture, coins, liturgical objects, personal belongings, and other items that speak to the contributions of Catholics to American history.

Manuscripts

The Society’s collections include the papers and records of approximately 100 Catholic individuals and organizations, including The Fenian Brotherhood, an Irish-American Nationalist society; Martin Griffin, the noted Philadelphia publisher and historian; Herman Hauser, the founder of the American Ecclesiastical Review; and the Rodrigue Family, French emigres from San Domingue (Haiti).

Newspapers and Periodicals

The Society’s collections include approximately 200,000 issues of Catholic newspapers, mainly from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of which are extremely rare.  They also include approximately 150 Catholic periodicals from that same time period, including children’s, literary, theological, and pastoral magazines.

Pamphlets

The Society’s collections include nearly 9,000 pamphlets from the 1700s through the mid-twentieth century.  The majority concern issues relate to the development of Catholicism in the United States, including accounts of anti-Catholicism, as well as institutional and associational publications. 

Parish Histories

The Society’s collections include over 1,300 parish histories from across the United States, with over half drawn from parishes in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia  

Photographs

The Society’s collections include over 5,000 photographs and prints, including the Packard and Butler collection which contains several hundred black and white lithographs of churches throughout the United States dating from the 1880s. 

More information

For information concerning our collections or their use, please visit the Catholic Historical Research Center of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, or call them at 610-667-2125.