Digital Collections

Digital Collection

The Sid Lapidus '59 Collection on Liberty and the American Revolution

After nearly 60 years of collecting, Sid Lapidus ’59 has presented to the Library more than 2700 volumes representing the fruits of his enthusiasm. Broadly conceived, the collection charts the definition and re-definiton of rights and liberties endemic to Western political traditions. The main focus is texts and documents relating to the American Revolution, its run-up dating back to the Commonwealth men, and coming down to documents of the early Federal government.

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Sid had a vision for his collection, a vision that he knew he could realize in a partnership with Princeton University Library. He wanted to make his collection available both at Princeton and to the world. This vision is in part fulfilled through this digital collection, openly available to all and, most importantly fully searchable. By searching in the Keyword box above, you are searching all the text in the entire corpus.
The gift of the collection marks another milestone of Sid’s broad philanthrophy. At Princeton, he has endowed the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professorship in the American Revolutionary Era in the History Department as well as endowments for the Lapidus Family Fund for American Jewish Studies, the Sid Lapidus ’59 Research Fund for Studies of the Age of Revolution and the Enlightenment at the Library, and the Ruth and Sid Lapidus ’59 Research Fellowships administered by Princeton’s Humanities Council. He has served on the advisory council of both the History Department and the program in Judaic Studies.
Beyond Princeton, he provided the founding gift for the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Trans-Atlantic Slavery at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. He has made numerous gifts to NYU Langone, including special gifts to their Health Sciences Library. He has served as Chairman or board member of such organizations as the American Antiquarian Society, the American Jewish Historical Society, the Center for Jewish History, the New-York Historical Society, NYU Langone, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, the UJA Federation of NY, and the United Neighborhood Houses.
After Princeton, he graduated Columbia Law School in 1962, and was an attorney with the Securities and Exchange Commission in New York before leaving the practice of law in 1967 to join Warburg Pincus LLC, a private equity firm. A long-time partner, he retired from Warburg in 2007. 

A DPUL online exhibition was also built as a companion to "The Most Formidable Weapon Against Errors: The Sid Lapidus '59 Collection & the Age of Reason" - a 2025 exhibition in the Ellen and Leonard Milberg Gallery at Firestone Library.  Curated by Steven A. Knowlton, Librarian for History and African American Studies.

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Copyright

Princeton University Library claims no copyright governing this digital resource. It is provided for free, on a non-commercial, open-access basis, for fair-use academic and research purposes only. Anyone who claims copyright over any part of these resources and feels that they should not be presented in this manner is invited to contact Princeton University Library, who will in turn consider such concerns and make reasonable efforts to respond to such concerns.

Preferred Citation

[Identification of item], [Sub-collection name (if applicable)], The Sid Lapidus '59 Collection on Liberty and the American Revolution Collection, Princeton University Library.

Romanization

Please refer to the Library of Congress Romanization tables when searching the collection.