Scope and arrangement
The Fredrika Tuttle Blair research materials, dated 1960s to 1980s, hold the research files of Fredrika Tuttle Blair's biography on Isadora Duncan entitled "Isadora, Portrait of the Artist as a Woman" (McGraw-Hill, 1986). The collection consists of notebooks, original manuscripts, research notes, and related material.
Blair wrote extensively in the bound notebooks and placed handwritten slips of paper between the pages. Some of the folders of draft materials and notes are housed with mailing envelopes. These mailing envelopes contain Blair’s comments about the contents of the folders. It is critical that these envelopes remain housed with the manuscripts because the envelopes contain information pertinent to that particular manuscript. The collection does not hold a complete manuscript draft. There are several early drafts of book chapters dated between 1960s – 1970s. During Blair's research, she examined the research of others on Duncan. There is a translation of the article “Pages from the Past” by Ilya Shneider. There is no correspondence with the exception of two short notes from friends on personal matters and information about Duncan. The remaining material is printed matter. The collection languages are French and English.
Arrangement
The collection is arranged into two groups. One group is volumes and the second group is manuscripts in folders. The volumes are notebooks and loose leaf binders. The volumes have many handwritten notes between the pages. Some of the volumes are sequentially numbered with some irregularity in numbering. The loose manuscripts are housed in folders and envelopes. The folders do not have any identifying information as to content of these folders. Similar to the notebooks with the hand-annotated notes, some mailing envelopes with the loose manuscripts have hand written notes.