Biography:

Atherton Blight attended school in Philadelphia, graduated from Harvard and admitted to the Pennsylvania bar, and spent much of his adult life in Newport, R.I., and in Europe. His papers comprise a book of travel expenses, 1849, 1856-1858, and a travel diary, 1855-1856, of a Grand Tour to the Continent, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Crimea, and Greece. In Jerusalem, he visited Warder Cresson, a former Quaker from Philadelphia who had converted to Judaism and was an early Zionist. Blight also describes the battlefields and veterans of the Crimean War.