About the OI

Sid and Ruth Lapidus are longtime supporters of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. Mr. Lapidus has served as a member of the Omohundro Institute’s Board of Directors since 2008.

Photo courtesy of Sid & Ruth Lapidus

A retired partner of the New York-based private equity firm Warburg Pincus, Mr. Lapidus graduated from Princeton University with a history degree and has a law degree from Columbia University. Mr. Lapidus is a collector of books and pamphlets focused on the theme of liberty in American history. He grew up in New Rochelle, New York, not far from the Thomas Paine Cottage, and the first book that Mr. Lapidus purchased for his collection the summer after graduating from Princeton was a first edition of Paine’s “Rights of Man.” Highlights of his collection were given to Princeton in 2004 in honor of his 50th reunion and featured in an exhibit and catalogue at Princeton titled “Liberty & the American Revolution.”

Mr. Lapidus’s wide-ranging philanthropic interests include a strong commitment to historical research and scholarship. In addition to his membership on the Omohundro Institute’s Board of Directors, he is Chair of the American Antiquarian Society; recently made 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; is Chair of the American Jewish Historical Society; and is a trustee and Chair of the Library Committee of the New York Historical Society. He is also a longtime member of the Advisory Council of the Department of History at Princeton University.