Scope and Content Note
The papers of Arnold Lucius Gesell (1880-1961) span the years 1870-1971, with the bulk of the material concentrated in the period 1910-1950. The collection consists of correspondence, memoranda, reports, published and unpublished writings, addresses, lectures, and film scripts, clinical and medical books, personnel records, contracts, biographical and genealogical material, abstracts, photographs, research data, and other papers pertaining chiefly to Gesell's work as director of the Yale Clinic of Child Development, his studies of the mental and physical development of infants and children, and his role in the debate on the developmental influences of environment and heredity. The Gesell Papers are organized in fifteen series: Family Correspondence, General Correspondence, Subject File, Collected Papers File, Speech and Article File, Book File, Book Contribution File, Book Review File, Monograph File, Film Script File, Miscellany, Scrapbooks, Addition, Closed, and Oversize.
Family papers and correspondence account for material dated prior to Gesell's birth in Alma, Wisconsin, and comprise the bulk of the papers dated between 1880 and 1900. Although these papers contain documentation of subjects other than those relating to Arnold Gesell, they serve primarily as a source of biographical data relating to Gesell's family life, his childhood and adolescence, student days at Alma High School, 1893-1896, and Stevens Point Normal School, 1896-1899, and his work as a teacher at the Stevens Point High School, 1899-1901. Further references to Gesell's life prior to 1900 may be found in the letters of Margaret Ashmure, M. M. Beddall, Lucius Miley, Laurence Pease, and Charles Sylvester.
Information relating specifically to Gesell's University of Wisconsin days may be found in letters of James Livingston, Adolph Meyer, Michael O'Shea, Laurence Pease, Theron Pray, William Ruediger, Charles Sylvester, and Frederick Jackson Turner. References to his student days at Clark University are included in letters of William Burnham, Granville Stanley Hall, James Livingston, Tadasu Misawa, Edgar Swift, and Lewis Madison Terman. References to his work at the Los Angeles State Normal School occur in the letters of his wife, Beatrice Chandler Gesell.
From 1911 to 1948, Gesell was director of the Yale Clinic of Child Development, where he conducted studies of the physical growth and mental development of infants and children. This phase of Gesell's career is the most thoroughly and extensively documented. References to his work at Yale may be found in the correspondence, writings, and subject files. Particularly pertinent materials are among the letters of James Rowland Angell, Roswell Parker Angier, Charlotte Malachowski Buhler, Glenna E. Bullis, Leonard Carmichael, Henry Herbert Goddard, Walter R. Miles, Grover Francis Powers, Lewis Madison Terman, T. Wingate Todd, and Robert Mearns Yerkes. Other material relating to his work at Yale is in Subject File folders labeled Catherine Strunk Amatruda, Louise Bates Ames, Burton Menaugh Castner, Connecticut Child Welfare Commission, Connecticut Child Welfare Survey, Growth, Frances Lillian Ilg, Helen Thompson, Yale Clinic, and Yale University. References in the Speech and Article File relate to Gesell's theoretical positions and his emergence, while director of the Yale Clinic of Child Development, as a spokesman for the hereditarian theory that the child grows as his germ plasm directs.
Other material in the collection concerns Gesell's retirement from Yale in 1950 and to his association as a research consultant from 1950 to 1958 with the institute that bore his name, the Gesell Institute of Child Development, and material relating to German immigration and assimilation, circa 1870-1910, the character of J. Willard Gibbs, the childhood development of Abraham Lincoln, and to the use of motion picture films as educational and scientific research tools.
The Addition series includes family and general correspondence, card files, school papers, speeches and articles, a notebook, photographs, drawings, financial papers, legal papers, and printed matter.
Oversize consists of charts, graphs, illustrations, certificates, diplomas, printed matter and other material.