Professional Correspondence, 1950-2012

Scope and content:

Incoming and some outgoing correspondence spanning many decades, and is organized chronologically. Note fields for most entries highlight significant correspondents or topics. The early correspondence (1950s to 1980) contains mainly departmental correspondence, proposals, conference invitations, and research exchanges, especially with departmental colleague and collaborator Morris David Morris at the University of Washington. From the 1980s on, files chiefly contain recommendation letters, academic appointments, invitations, workshops, proposals, and reports as well as other routine academic correspondence. In some cases, manuscripts of book chapters, papers or abstracts are attached to correspondence. Prominent correspondents include Robert Fogel, Amartya Sen, Vernon Smith, Elinor Ostrom, George Stigler, Oliver E. Williamson and Herman Wold. Note that since 1990s, D. North's correspondence was mainly conducted by his secretary, Fannie Batt. This series contain files called "Stanford" and "Benzonia". Those files and some others are preserved as received by Rubenstein. They contain correspondence forwarded by fax to North by his secretary. Since 1990s, North used to spend summers in Benzonia and usually spent months from January to March in Stanford at the Hoover Institution, doing his research and collaborating there with his coauthor Barry R. Weingast.

Folders are organized by date. For most of the early correspondence, there is one folder for each year. In later years, there is mostly one folder for each month. In later years North also titled some folders according to a particular subject or organization.

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