Archive

1977 Spring Equinox cover of WomenSpirit

All social change and cultural movements have their associated resources for the exchange of information, ideas, stories, and art. Particularly in the women’s movement, the effort to create newsletters, journals, and other forms of information dissemination was a proactive step taken to assert women’s stories and to locate the power of the press within women-run communities. These periodicals, both large and small in scale, reveal the ways women connected to each other and to larger spiritual and cultural concepts. Local artist, activist, and feminist Jay Goldspinner was engaged with many of these communities, particularly those characterizing the spiritual elements of the women’s liberation and feminist movements, and collected and saved their periodicals. Her collection includes journals focusing on feminist linguistics, goddess myths and spirituality, Wiccan and witch traditions, progressive politics, and women’s spirituality and community in local and international settings. Each is a unique window into discourses of women’s history, feminist movements, and social change work.

The Jay Goldspinner Collection consists of issues of feminist and progressive periodicals, journals, and newsletters from over five decades, along with correspondence, ephemera, and scrapbooks from Goldspinner’s life, especially her work as a storyteller. Published titles represented include Always in Season, Goddessing, The Lonesome Node, The People’s Voice of Franklin County, Themis/Thesmophoria, Wicked Word, and an almost complete run, including the two indexes, of the seminal magazine of feminist spirituality, WomenSpirit.

A long-time agricultural and environmental writer and editor, Susan J. Harlow has deep roots in New England and Vermont agriculture and organic farming communities. Harlow Farm, where she lives and grew up, was one of the first organic vegetable farms in New England, and was named Vermont Sustainable Farm of the Year in 1998. Her interests in journalism, communications, and farming have led to numerous publications, projects, and collaborations, including a period as Associate Editor for the Farm Progress Companies, serving as the Director of Communications at Antioch University New England, a published history on the University of Vermont Extension System, and numerous articles, including recurring pieces in American Agriculturalist.

The Susan Harlow Organic Farming Oral History Collection consists of six audio oral histories and additional notes from other interviews conducted by Harlow with Vermont organic farmers. Many of the interviews were part of a 2013 exhibit “Plowing Old Ground: Vermont’s Organic Farming Pioneers,” a collaborative effort with photographer John Nopper, who photographed the subjects of Harlow’s interviews. The visual exhibit featured interview summaries and quotations alongside photographs from six farms and their farmers, all pioneers in the history of organic farm production, marketing, and distribution in Vermont. The collection contains Harlow’s notes and transcriptions along with oral histories and interviews with: Jake and Liz Guest, Jack and Anne Lazor, Joey Klein, Bruce Kaufman, Howard Prussack, Paul Harlow, R. Houriet, Samuel Kaymen, Will and Judy Stevens, Richard Wiswall, and Enid Wonnacott.

Everett Hoagland at the PAWA World Poetry Conference in Accra, Ghana, 1999.

Poet Everett Hoagland was born and raised in Philadelphia and attended and graduated from Lincoln University, and later Brown University on a full fellowship for pursuing his Masters of Arts. Hoagland’s poetry came of age during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and the Black Arts Movement, and is often powerfully political. Driven by the history, music, rhythms, and both collective and individual stories from African and African American culture and experiences, Hoagland is one of the most significant African American poets of the late twentieth century. His second chapbook, Black Velvet, was published by the pioneering Broadside Press in 1970, and he has remained widely published and anthologized through to the present day, including his most recent anthology addition, a poem about the Black Lives Matter movement. In addition to his writing, Hoagland has given readings across the nation and globe, and also served as a teacher and mentor to many, primarily in his position as a Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth for over thirty years. He has won numerous awards and honors, including a 2023 American Book Award, the Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry from the American Literature Association’s Society for African American Literature and Culture, the Gwendolyn Brooks Award for Fiction, two state-wide poetry competitions for Massachusetts Artists Foundation fellowships, the Distinguished Service to University award from UMass Dartmouth, two MA Local Cultural Council grants for book publications, ForeWord Magazine’s Best Poetry Book award, and the 2015 Langston Hughes Society Award. Hoagland also served, from 1994 to 1998, as the inaugural poet laureate of his adopted hometown of New Bedford, MA.

The Everett Hoagland Papers include manuscript materials and over twenty books documenting Hoagland’s decades-long career as a poet and writer on racial politics and African American experiences. They consist of photographs; performance and presentation programs, reviews, and recordings; interviews and articles; and unpublished and published writings including copies of Hoagland’s column in the New Bedford The Standard Times, a draft of his Master’s thesis, short fiction stories, a scrapbook of unpublished poetry, and poetry in magazines, periodicals, Hoagland’s authored poetry books, and numerous anthologies.

Rufus Jones: A Luminous Life documentary

The 2001 documentary Rufus Jones: A Luminous Life was produced by members of Wellesley Friends Meeting in Massachusetts. Documentary film maker Sharon Mullally recorded interviews with people who knew Jones as a colleague, teacher, or mentor, and with Quaker scholars about placing Jones’s life and legacy into context. Mullally and Barbara Attie served as Producers and Directors, and Frederic G. Corneel served as Executive Producer of the 40-minute documentary. A 28-minute broadcast version aired on PBS in 2002.

Rufus Matthew Jones (1863-1948) was a Quaker leader, mystic, philosopher, and activist, born in Maine. One of the most influential Quakers of the 20th century, Jones was widely published; helped found the American Friends Service Committee; was a world traveler, lecturer, and learner; helped instigate the Quäkerspeisung feeding program after World War I; and worked to heal the divide between two branches of American Quakerism that split in the mid-19^th century. Jones attended the Providence Friends School in Rhode Island and Haverford College in Pennsylvania, and having obtained an MA from Harvard, returned to Haverford as a professor of Psychology and Philosophy.

The Rufus Jones: A Luminous Life Collection consists of the raw, edited, and final versions of the materials used to create the documentary, Rufus Jones: A Luminous Life. It contains videotaped interviews with people who knew Jones as well as Quaker scholars, archival film footage and archival audio of Jones and the places he lived and worked, as well as several copies of the completed documentary. Formats include Betacam SP, DVCAM, and DVD.

Nina Keller riding in the back of a hay truck, Wendell, 1980.

Currently residing in Wendell, Massachusetts, Nina Keller has had an active role in environmental and social activism in the Pioneer Valley and New England area for the better part of 40 years. Since the 1970s, Keller has played an active role in local and regional activism, from the antinuclear movement to hazardous waste disposal. She was an initial member of the Alternative Energy Coalition (AEC), was part of the Friends of the Earth (FOE) environmental organization, and most notably took part in efforts to close the nearby Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant. At 62, Keller currently chairs the Wendell Board of Health, and has had a recent history of participation in local government.

The Nina Keller Collection is largely organized into five subject areas used by Keller to organize her files: Economics; Environmental Issues; Hazardous Materials; Nuclear Power; and Pesticides and Herbicides. Of note within these files are local, state, and federal reports and documents covering topics such as nuclear emergency evacuation plans, chemical sprays and their health effects, and hazardous waste regulation. Several items reflect Keller’s personal life, most notably two journals from Montague Farm, used communally for diary entries, drawings, clippings, photographs, and account keeping. The collection’s focus spans from the 1970s to the 1980s, as well as the early 2000s.

"J.P. Konsevich, Truck driver," ca. 1934

J.P. Konsevich, almost certainly Joseph Peter Konsevich (born Oct 22, 1921 in Millers Falls, Mass.; death May 9, 1988 in Westfield, Mass.), was one of the over 99,500 men to join the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in Massachusetts. The Emergency Conservation Work (March 31, 1933 – Jan. 1, 1942; renamed, Civilian Conservation Corps in 1937) was just one of the many relief programs established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to aid in the effort to curb rising unemployment and to lift the “spiritual” morale of the country. In Massachusetts the main work accomplished was in tree planting, firefighting, and tree and plant disease and insect control, although several recreational facilities were also built in the forests and parks. Konsevich served on one of the latter projects, as a member of the 116^th Company, stationed at Camp S-62 in Wendell State Forest.

This combination of two homemade photograph albums thoroughly documents the CCC 116th Company, and their camp in Wendell State Forest. Of the over 800 photographs, 518 are identified, with the majority being portraits of the men at camp facilities. The local landscape of concern to the company is also featured, including the Connecticut River, Erving, Greenfield, Northampton, Northfield, Turners Falls, and especially documentation of the aftermath of the flood of March and April, 1936. A small set of photographs additionally document Konsevich’s presence at the Chicago World’s Fair (Century of Progress Exposition of 1933).

Cover of Liberation News Service issue 441, June 10, 1972.

Founded in 1967, Liberation News Service, an alternative news agency, issued twice-weekly packets aimed at providing inexpensive images, articles, and art reflecting a countercultural outlook. First from its office in Washington, D.C., and then from New York City, LNS provided underground and college papers around the globe with radical and unconventional coverage of the war in Vietnam, global liberation struggles, American politics, and the cultural revolution. Two months after moving to New York City in June 1968, LNS split into two factions, with the sides mirroring common points of dispute within the New Left. The more traditional political and Marxist activists remained in New York, while those more aligned with the counterculture and “hippie” movement settled on farms in western Massachusetts and southern Vermont. For a year each faction put out competing versions of LNS news packets, until the winter conditions and small staff at the farm in Montague caused their production to end in January 1969. LNS-New York continued its production of unique leftist coverage of national and international issues throughout the 1970s, closing in 1981.

The LNS-NY Records include a relatively complete run of packets 102-701 (1968-1975) sent to the subscribing underground press newspaper the Indianapolis Free Press. Some packets and years are more complete than others, and these New York packets are especially dense with photographs compared to earlier LNS packets from before the split in 1968. The collection also includes a small selection of other artwork, articles, and materials kept by the Indianapolis Free Press.

A World of Possibilities logo, ca. 1998

Founded in 1995, by founder and former executive director Mark Sommer, the Mainstream Media Project (MMP) was a nonprofit public education organization focused on print and broadcast media about creative approaches in achieving peace, security, and sustainability in an interdependent global community. Until its closing in early 2014, it was particularly involved with placing top policy analysts, social innovators, and on-the-ground organizers on radio and television stations across the country and globe. One such project, A World of Possibilities radio show, founded in 2001, was an award-winning one hour weekly show hosted by Sommer. A program “of spirited global conversations,” featuring interviews searching for understanding of, and solutions to, longstanding global public affairs challenges, A World of Possibilities was nationally and internationally syndicated until it ceased broadcasting in 2011.

The MMP Records contain over ten linear feet of CD and DVD masters of uncut interviews and produced radio shows. Shows, including Heart of the Matter and A World of Possibilities, explore promising new thinking and experimentation in fields ranging from energy, food, water, and wilderness to human rights, global security, and public health, and include interviews with leading experts and innovators, such as Studs Terkel, Pete Seeger, Laurie Garrett, Wangari Maathai, Frances Moore Lappe, Howard Gardner, Lily Yeh, Robert Reich, Majora Carter, Van Jones and many more. The collection also contains MMP business files, consisting of correspondence, reports, articles, grant information, and organizational materials.

Founded in 1968, the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute (MLRI) is a statewide non-profit poverty law and policy center. Their mission is to advance economic, racial, and social justice through legal action, education, and advocacy, specializing in large-scale impact litigation and policy reforms in a wide range of poverty law fields. The MLRI Housing Unit was involved in several cases attempting to protect low-income and minority housing in urban settings in Massachusetts in the 1980s. In a 1982 case, Olga Ramos et al. v. Ernest Proulx et al., nine minority residents of Holyoke and two Hispanic non-profit service agencies sued Mayor Proulx and the City of Holyoke for discriminatory practices related to disproportionately demolishing housing in low income and minority neighborhoods. In Boston, MLRI joined as council for the plaintiffs in a 1981 case, Viviana Munoz-Mendoza, et al. v. Samuel R. Pierce, Jr., et al., where South End residents sued the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), claiming federal funds were being used to racially desegregate their neighborhood when a HUD grant for the Copley Place development did not make a thorough study of the impact on residential integration or address a long standing desire for low-income housing on an adjacent site known as Tent City.

The MLRI Records consist of legal records, memos, correspondence, and strategy related to litigation for fair housing practice in the Holyoke and Boston cases, Ramos v. Proulx and Munoz-Mendoza v. Pierce. Newspaper clippings, city statistics and reports, and other documents stemming from the discovery portions of the cases are also abundant.

Adolph and Helen Meyer, Mass. Federation Presentee Ball, at Hotel Statler Hilton Boston, 1959 Nov.

A founding member of the Massachusetts Federation of Polish Womens’ Clubs, holding every post in the organization, Helen (Gorecka) Meyer (1908-2003) was incredibly active in the Polish community in Boston, Cambridge, and later Cape Cod. Born in Poland, Helen came to America at the age of three, living with her parents in Lynn and Wilmington, before moving to Cambridge. She married Adolph Meyer in 1928, and both were important business owners (establishments included the White Eagle Restaurant in Cambridge, the Log Cabin Restaurant in Waltham, South Boston Liquors, and Al’s Bottled Liquors) and community members. Honored by the Mass. Federation of Polish Womens’ Clubs in 1963 as their “Woman of the Year,” Helen was also actively involved in the St. Joseph and Sacred Heart Societies of St. Hedwig’s Parish, local and national Polish Roman Catholic Union groups, and the Kosciuszko Foundation Presentation Balls.

Compiled from Helen Meyer’s papers by her nephew Stan Bartosiak, this collection of personal, family, and community papers – including published materials, photographs, slides, correspondence, audiovisual material, news clippings and ephemera – documents the Polish community in the Boston area from the 1930s through the 1990s. Some records concerning the Meyer, Gorecka, and connected families are from earlier. Various Polish clubs and organizations are represented through society badges, souvenir programs, financial records, correspondence, and photographs, with the Kosciuszko Foundation Presentation Balls particularly well documented. Additional audiovisual recordings document Bartosiak and his work an educator.