This collection documents the professional career of Dr. William O. Aydelotte, professor of history from 1947 to 1978 at the University of Iowa. Lecture notes, speeches, publications, correspondence, and Department of History reports and minutes are included. These papers also contain Dr. Aydelotte's publications reviews, and document his participation in history conferences, committees and councils.Dr. Aydelotte was a prolific writer, and preserved his notes about everything from a 1924 meeting of the home room boys during his tenth grade, to the diaries he kept over a sixty-year period, to his vacation in Ireland, and to notes on the meetings of the Know-Nothing Club -- a group of University of Iowa professors who met informally, with no official minutes recorded. Dr. Aydelotte classified and indexed his major research notes, and filed them in a dozen card catalog drawers, as noted in the box list below.

The focus of Dr. Aydelotte's research, in the area of political science, was the British Parliament. Such research topics are represented as the Victorian reformation, social attitudes in the work of Charles Dickens, politics in detective stories, as well as his research about using computers to analyze research statistics. Dr. Aydelotte maintained detailed files on subjects that interested him, such as the Latin hexameter verse machine, exhibited in London during 1845.This collection includes some material about Dr. Aydelotte's family. Box 58 contains information about his father, Frank (1880-1956), who was president of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania from 1921 to 1940. Genealogical material about William O. Aydelotte's Irish cousins is housed in box 52.

Dr. Aydelotte was diagnosed with tuberculosis in September 1950, and he recorded the course of treatment he received at Oakdale Sanatorium, as well as descriptions of the facility, in nearly daily letters to his mother and brother during a nine-month period. These letters are arranged in chronological order in box 70.