A Little Weekend Reading

We’re still working our way through filing cabinets full of unusual and interesting research materials about the Humane Society of the United States, and eventually it will all find its way to the HumaneWatch Document Library. Today we came across a collection of papers we obtained a few years ago from Texas Tech University.

The Texas Tech library is the final resting place of 13 boxes of papers and 10 scrapbooks that belonged to the late Amy Freeman Lee (1914-2004). In addition to being a cultural philanthropist and a co-founder of the San Antonio Symphony, Lee was a Board Member of the Humane Society of the United States for a record 35 years.

In late 2006, we asked a Special Collections librarian at TTU to send us copies of anything in the Amy Freeman Lee Collection that referenced HSUS. Our request was honored, and the result of that research is 208 pages that you can view here. (It’s a large file, so we recommend that you save a copy instead of browsing it online.)

Different people will find different portions of this material fascinating, so we won’t hazard a guess about what may be the most interesting tidbit. But it’s a treasure trove of information for anyone looking to understand what HSUS used to be—which is the first step toward recognizing just what it has become.