Archive

In August 1945, U. S. Army second lieutenant John R. “Jack” Allison was on a troop ship headed for the final invasion of Japan. By the time he arrived, the war had ended. Allison, a native of Ontario and the main provider of his family since he lost his father at 18, had immigrated to Evanston, Ill., in 1933. While taking evening classes at Northwestern University, he worked in a bank, rising from courier to internal auditor, before leaving for the printing firm R.R. Donnelley. He married Marion Sellers, formerly of Missouri, in 1942. When World War II began, Allison enlisted in the army. In Japan, with the war over, he became part of the American Occupation under General Douglas MacArthur, helping in a series of roles to rebuild and stabilize the Japanese economy. Eventually, he became director of finance, supervising the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry and the Central Bank of Japan. Marion and their three-year-old daughter, Jacqueline, joined him in Japan in 1947. While there, Marion studied the Japanese language, visited museums, learned crafts, taught English to new Japanese friends and acquaintances, and had two more children. After the family returned to the U.S. in 1951, the Allisons had another two children.

The Allison Papers richly document the family’s experience of American-occupied Japan from their different perspectives, one as a member of military and government operations, the other as a parent raising children and immersing herself in the culture. The collection includes materials from Jack Allison’s military service and work and letters written by Marion, mostly to her parents, along with two photograph albums, a scrapbook, and family histories in print and audiovisual form.

A distinguished, productive, and beloved professor of chemistry, Louis A. Carpino, born in 1927, was the son of Italian immigrants who settled in Des Moines, Iowa, where he grew up and went to high school and college. He earned his doctorate in organic chemistry from University of Illinois in 1953 and in the fall of 1954 arrived at UMass Amherst, where he would spend his career. A pioneer in the development of amino‐protecting groups and coupling reagents for use in the synthesis of biologically active materials such as pharmaceuticals, polynucleotides, PNAs, peptides, and small proteins, Carpino had some 30 patents to his name. He was honored both on campus (with, for example, a University Samuel Conti Faculty Fellowship Award and a College Outstanding Researcher Award), nationally (Hirschman Award from the American Chemical Society), and internationally (Humboldt Award and Max Bergmann Medal, both from Germany). In 1958, Carpino married one of his former chemistry students; Barbara Carpino finished her degree with the class of 1962. They had six children; the family joined Carpino on his sabbaticals in Italy and other overseas locations. Louis Carpino retired in 2004 with emeritus status and continued to be active in his lab. He passed away in January 2019.

The Carpino Papers consist of notebooks, research notes and files, correspondence, files relating to patents, and reprints of Carpino’s publications, along with personal papers and memorabilia, letters and notes (many written on the 3×5 index cards Carpino habitually carried in his shirt pocket), photographs, several passports, and honors and awards given to Carpino, including the 1998 Max Bergmann Medal. Notable is an illustrated comical family story created by Carpino as a teenager in Iowa, done in pen on loose paper.

The microbiologist and genomics researcher Shiladitya DasSarma, a UMass Amherst faculty member from 1986 to 2001, was born in Kolkata, India, in 1957. His father was a chemistry professor and his mother a high school English teacher; the family immigrated to the United States in 1966, shortly after the passage of the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which opened US immigration to Asians. His father joined the faculty of West Virginia State College, and young DasSarma attended public school nearby, graduating first in his high school class. His first scientific publications were with his father, in coordination chemistry, when he was a teenager. At Indiana University, DasSarma majored in chemistry, did research in DNA mapping and transposition, and graduated with honors in December 1978. In the biochemistry program at MIT, he worked as a National Science Foundation fellow under Nobel laureate HG Khorana and earned his PhD in 1984. After postdoctoral work at Harvard Medical School, DasSarma joined the department of microbiology at UMass Amherst. His research focused on the molecular biology and genetics of halophilic Archaea, building on pioneering work he had started as a graduate student. In his fifteen years at the university, DasSarma was busy with teaching, mentoring, research grants, publications, patents, launching the company HaloGenetics, and was promoted to full Professor. He made news with his group’s work on the genome sequencing of the first halophilic Archaea and one of the first microbial genomes, in 2000. In 2001, DasSarma moved his research lab to the University of Maryland.

The Shiladitya DasSarma Papers document the life of a pioneering scientist from his childhood in India and West Virginia through his education and his UMass Amherst career. Consisting of correspondence, memorabilia, photographs, photograph albums, family scrapbooks, news clippings, publications, and material related to research and teaching, the papers also include materials from and about DasSarma’s parents and family history and DasSarma’s mother’s compilation of Indian folktales and stories.

At the height of the environmental movement, Springfield, Mass., public school teachers Lorraine Ide and Clifford A. Phaneuf set a goal of helping young students to understand and appreciate their role in nature. In collaboration with the city’s parks department and schools, Ide and Phaneuf opened the Environmental Center for Our Schools (ECOS) in 1970. Intended for elementary and middle school students in the city, ECOS enables students and teachers to expand their knowledge of the natural world by exploring the diverse habitats of Forest Park. The program was designed for immersive, hands-on discovery: students participate in outdoor activities, study nature, and learn the survival needs of all living things.

The ECOS records consist of materials from the organization’s planning and early years, including Title III information, curricula, evaluations, copies of tests, teaching guides, and other educational materials, publications, reports, meeting agendas, and conference materials.

Dedicated to a broad range of social justice and human rights issues, Theodore “Ted” Fay is a leading national and international activist, advocate, and scholar on the integration and inclusion of athletes with disabilities into mainstream sport. His focus on exposing practices of exclusion, inequity, and marginalization in sport faced by individuals based on race, gender, and disability—and his unique perspective on this intersectionality—would serve as the basis of most of his scholarly work including his 1999 doctoral dissertation. Fay played a key role in creating Project Interdependence (1981-1987), a one-of-a-kind statewide training program sponsored by the California State Departments of Rehabilitation and Education, as well as in the creation of the U.S. Disabled Ski Team (USDST) and the effort to integrate the USDST into the U.S. Ski Team in 1986. Involved in the founding and development of the International Paralympic Committee (IPC), he served in multiple capacities related to Nordic skiing from 1988 until 2010. Fay also helped draft Article 30.5 of the 2007 United Nations Convention on the Human Rights for Persons with a Disability (CRPD) and, in 2013 and 2019, contributed to revisions of Acts of Congress concerning the inclusion and equitable treatment of students with disabilities and the integration of Olympic and Paralympic athletes. With degrees from St. Lawrence University, the University of Oregon, and UMass Amherst (Ph.D. 1999), Fay retired as a Professor Emeritus of Sport Management in 2018 after a distinguished two-decade career at the State University of New York at Cortland.

Chronicling a personal story of more than five decades of activist work while highlighting Fay’s 40-year involvement in more than ten Paralympic and Olympic Games and four U.S. Olympic/Paralympic Bids, the Fay Papers include correspondence, scholarly articles, research and background materials, drafts, writings, reports, student papers, photographs, scrapbooks, and memorabilia.

Attorney and UMass alumnus Kenneth R. Feinberg, well known as a mediator, special master of compensation funds, and dedicated public servant, is a longtime devotee of opera and classical music. Since his days as a law student in New York in the late 1960s, continuing through his career practicing law in Washington, D.C., Feinberg has regularly attended operas, concerts, musical theater, and other musical performances. He has also served as president of the Washington National Opera and led a private opera appreciation group.
This extensive collection of more than 1,000 items encompasses a wide range of composers, productions, concerts, companies, and venues, mainly in the United States, with some European performances represented. Documenting more than five decades of concert- and opera-going, and arranged in rough chronological order according to Feinberg’s numbering system, many of the programs are searchable by composer in an accompanying card index created by Feinberg (more recent programs are simply filed chronologically). There is also a small amount of related ephemera, including some vintage programs. Additions to the collection are ongoing.

An activist and advocate for social and racial justice since he was a teenager, Bill Fletcher, Jr., born in New York in 1954, graduated from Harvard, and went to work as a welder in a Massachusetts shipyard. He soon became active in the labor movement, as a worker, an organizer, and a union staff member, and in electoral campaigns. Fletcher became a union staff person in Boston in 1986 with District 65-United Auto Workers.  In 1990, he and his family moved to Washington, D.C. where he held a series of positions with the National Postal Mail Handlers Union, the Service Employees International Union, and the national AFL-CIO. He has also held positions with the George Meany Center for Labor Studies/National Labor College and with TransAfrica Forum, for which he served as president and CEO. Fletcher is author of “They’re Bankrupting Us!” And Twenty Other Myths About Unions; he is coauthor of The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1934-1941 and Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path Toward Social Justice. He has also published two murder/mystery novels, The Man Who Fell From the Sky and The Man Who Changed Colors.  He serves on the editorial board of BlackCommentator.com and has contributed to numerous publications. As a writer, scholar, speaker, and activist, as well as an organizational consultant and a mentor, Fletcher continues his advocacy work. He lives with his wife, Candice, in Maryland.

The Bill Fletcher, Jr., Papers document the activities and interests of a lifelong radical and includes speeches, correspondence, material on the Black Radical Congress, and materials from an array of left-wing organizations. In addition to materials directly connected to Fletcher’s work, there are also pamphlets and other publications that he collected.

Gretchen Gerzina, Paul Murray Kendall Chair in Biography and Professor of English at UMass Amherst, served as dean of Commonwealth Honors College for five years before joining the English department full-time. A native of Ann Arbor, Mich., who grew up in Springfield, Mass., Gerzina is the child of a white mother and Black father who, in her research and writing, has often engaged with issues of race and the lives of those affected by racial and other boundaries. She is known for her biographies, including those of Dora Carrington and Frances Hodgson Burnett; her work on Black Britain including Black England: A Forgotten Georgian History (a revised and reissued version of Black London: Life Before Emancipation); and the acclaimed Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Family Moved Out of Slavery and Into Legend. Gerzina hosted public radio’s nationally syndicated program “The Book Show,” interviewing many of contemporary literature’s notable figures, from 1997 to 2012, and a ten-part BBC radio series, “Britain’s Black Past,” which aired in 2016. She has also taught at Vassar, Barnard, and Dartmouth, where she was the first Black woman to chair an Ivy League English department.

The Gerzina Papers consist of materials relating to some of Gerzina’s research and published books and include notes, correspondence, draft manuscripts, and publication-related material, as well as approximately 400 recordings on CD of “The Book Show.” Additions to the collection are expected.

An accomplished and distinguished scholar of politics and the federal judiciary, Sheldon Goldman is also one of the longest-serving faculty members at the University of Massachusetts, having taught in the department of political science (known as the department of government until the early 1970s) from 1965 until his retirement in 2020. He earned his bachelor’s degree from New York University and his master’s degree and Ph.D. from Harvard. Goldman is known and lauded as much for his influential research and writings on federal courts, the politics of federal judicial selection, and constitutional politics, as for his teaching and mentorship of his students. Among his honors are several awards for outstanding teaching and the Chancellor’s Medal. He is the author of Picking Federal Judges: Lower Court Selection from Roosevelt Through Reagan and many other books and articles and has been interviewed on national news programs and in major publications.

The Goldman Papers document Goldman’s intellectual and pedagogical life and contributions as well as the evolution of UMass Amherst’s political science department. The collection includes correspondence, research notes, and administrative materials, along with copies of Goldman’s own publications and publications in which he is interviewed or quoted.

John Brooks Howard, Jr., known by his family as Brooks (and as J. B. or “Gibby” to his classmates), was a popular and vivid presence on the campus of Massachusetts Agricultural College from 1926 until 1929. Born in November 1908, he arrived from Reading, Mass., as part of the class of 1930; majored in biology; was elected editor-in-chief of the student newspaper the Collegian; was a member of the honor society and the rifle team; and loved wildlife and the outdoors, especially birds. Early one morning, in the spring of his junior year, he climbed to the high branches of a tree to collect specimens. His death at age 20, after falling from the tree, stunned the campus community and broke his mother’s heart, haunting his family for a long time after.

This collection provides glimpses into the life of a MAC student in the late 1920s, with some documentation of his observations of birds and nature and campus activities. It contains an assortment of Brooks’s own papers and possessions, as well as items kept by his family after his death: three diaries, correspondence, mementos and ephemera, photographs including three larger ones in frames, newspaper clippings, a pair of wooden shoes that was a gift from his Dutch friend Hans Van Leer ‘32, and a small field microscope apparently issued to Howard by the college.