In December 2025, Mrs. Elizabeth Shattuck donated her husband’s library to the University Library Donald & Beverly Gerth Special Collections & University Archives. The Peter Shattuck Library on Colonial and Revolutionary America includes more than 400 rare and contemporary books. The collection features notable Revolutionary-era authors such as John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. It also includes works by historians of the time, including David Ramsay, one of the first historians to write about the American Revolution, and Mercy Otis Warren, an American activist, poet, playwright, pamphleteer, and the first woman to publish a history of the War for Independence.
Additional items in the collection include several works by 17th-century Puritan clergyman Cotton Mather and his son, Increase Mather, as well as a rare account of the prosecutions of selected individuals for opinions deemed subversive to the church or state. This was known as the Antinomian controversy in Boston, Massachusetts, between 1636 and 1638. A Glass for the People of New-England, in which They may See Themselves, by Samuel Groome, provides the only surviving record of the trial and contains extensive information about the women involved in the controversy and the cruel treatment by the Puritans.
The collection also includes a rare edition of Aunt Sally, or the Cross the Way of Freedom: A Narrative of the Slave-Life and Purchase of the Mother of Rev. Isaac Williams of Detroit, Michigan. Sally Williams was an enslaved woman in North Carolina and later in Alabama. Her son purchased her freedom, and she relocated to Detroit, Michigan. In 1858, her story was published. As stated in the Preface, “[T]here are very few Anti-Slavery books adapted to the young.” This narrative, presented as a “little story” by the author, introduces this topic to young minds, hoping they will reflect deeply on the truths it conveys and that “this unfortunate people shall be slaves no longer, but shall find that, to them, all the Cross has been the Way of Freedom.”
Peter H. Shattuck was a distinguished professor who taught American history at Sacramento State for 33 years. He died in 2015, and his wife, Elizabeth, established an endowment in his name.