Archive

The Hon. Stephen P. Driscoll, UMass 1973, 1975 MEd, has had a lifelong fascination with American government and politics. He was a co-founder of the National Stonewall Democrats, a delegate to national conventions, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Massachusetts Democratic Party.

Assembled over many decades, Driscoll’s massive collection of political ephemera reflects his keen eye and broad interests, and encompasses every era in American government and politics, both state and federal, from George Washington to Joe Biden. Included in his collection are thousands of items and artifacts—including buttons, posters, flyers, pennants, sculpture, clothing, electronics, audio-visual items, toys, trinkets of all kinds, and much, much more—which offer tantalizing glimpses into American history, society, and material culture.

Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA to request materials from this collection.

Established by Lois Barber in Amherst, Mass., in 1992 with their first campaign at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, EarthAction has been organizing international campaigns ever since. As the world’s largest action network, the group’s campaigns address a variety of global issues from climate change and nuclear weapons to children’s rights and empowering women to protect the land. With a mission both to inform people about pressing problems facing the world and to move them to action, EarthAction creates and distributes information kits aimed at different audiences: individuals and groups, policymakers, and journalists.

The collection includes administrative files that illustrate the process of building a campaign, financial records, and publications, as well as action, legislative, and media kits created for many of the group’s international campaigns.

Acclaimed writer, women’s rights advocate, journalist, and educator, Zelma (Zee) Inez Edgell was born in Belize City, Belize in 1940. Zee Edgell holds an undergraduate degree in journalism from Polytechnic-Regent Street (now the University of Westminster) and a Master’s in Liberal Studies from Kent State University. Edgell has published four novels and several short stories throughout her illustrious career. Her breakout novel, Beka Lamb, published in 1982, was the first book to be released in a newly independent Belize (formerly British Honduras) and would gain international notoriety going on to win the Fawcett Society Book Prize. Before becoming a celebrated novelist Edgell spent her early years working as a journalist, first for Jamaica’s The Daily Gleaner and then as founding editor of the Belize-based newspaper The Reporter. Edgell also served as director of the Belize Women’s Bureau, a position she held under two different administrations. As an educator, Edgell taught for many years at Belizes’ St. Catherine Academy, an all-girls catholic school she attended as a youth. She lectured at the University College of Belize as well. Edgell would spend the remainder of her teaching career as a tenured professor in the English department at Ohio’s Kent State University beginning in 1992. While at Kent State, Edgell taught courses in creative writing, fiction writing, and post-colonial literature. In 2009, Edgell received an honorary doctorate in literature from the University of West Indies. That same year she retired from teaching and moved with her husband to St. Louis to be closer to her children and grandchildren until she died in 2020.

The Zee Edgell Papers features not only a deeper look into the author’s professional life but her personal life as well. The collection includes personal letters, postcards, and notes between Edgell and her loved ones; professional correspondence between and her publisher; drafts of her short stories and book chapters; newspaper articles; letters from her global travels with husband Alvin Edgell during his tenure with CARE; documents related to her time serving as director of the Belize Women’s Bureau; and literature on Belizean history. There are also materials related to her time as a faculty member in Kent State’s English Department.

Vietnamese children

A worker in the struggle against poverty and racism for five decades, David Entin was raised in New York City environs until his family moved to Jacksonville, Florida in 1953 when he was twelve years old. He began his anti-poverty work with the North Carolina volunteers, a pioneering early effort where he worked with low-come families in Durham, NC. David then joined the North Carolina Fund, a statewide Ford Foundation project where he helped develop and wrote the first rural anti-poverty program under the new Economic Opportunity Act for Craven County (New Bern), NC. From there he helped start the initial anti-poverty program in Jacksonville. His new career was interrupted by Vietnam War service with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Stationed in Quang Ngai Province, a Vietcong stronghold, and Da Nang between 1966 and 1968, Entin oversaw redevelopment projects and while not caught up in the fight itself, he was charged with assessing damage in Region One following the Tet Offensive. After returning home to Florida, Entin resumed his antipoverty work.

The collection centers around 51 detailed letters describing the two years that David Entin spent in Vietnam working with USAID; these letters serve as a diary recording Entin’s daily activities and observations and accompany several hundred slides and photographs. Also included in the collection are a series of short autobiographical essays that detail his childhood, early career, and service in Vietnam.

A manufacturing firm specializing in the production of onion skin paper, the Esleeck Manufacturing Company was established in 1898 as the Monadnock Paper Co. The principal owners, Augustine W. Esleeck and Alfred T. Judd, had worked together with the Valley Paper Mills of Holyoke, Mass., but when striking out on their own, moved to Turners Falls, believing the town to be the ideal location for a mil. Changing their name to Esleeck Manufacturing Co. in 1901, the firm sought to be a good neighbor, using local labor and products from local firms in their manufacturing. After more than 100 years of continuous operation, the company was purchased by Southworth Co. in 2006.

The collection consists chiefly of financial records, but also includes three minute books from 1898-1961 that capture the the company’s early history, as well as a memorial history of the company written by a long-term employee in 1954.

The Esperanto League for North America (ELNA) was founded in Sacramento, California in 1952 as an affiliate of the Universal Esperanto Association (UEA). Operating primarily within the United States, the League serves as a point of connection and education for speakers of Esperanto, an international constructed language, and holds annual national congresses for speakers at all levels of fluency. The League adopted the alias Esperanto-USA in 2007, though officially retaining the official name Esperanto League for North America.

The records of the Esperanto League for North America (Esperanto-USA) are an important resource for documenting the growth and development of the Esperanto movement in the United States from the end of the First World War to the present. The collection also includes material from the Esperanto Association of North America (EANA), which was founded in 1905 but dissolved after ELNA was established in protest of EANA’s president’s political controversies. Varied in both scope and content, the collection includes a significant body of correspondence from ELNA officers, documentation of world and national congresses, and a range of publications promoting the League and language. Of particular note, the collection includes several hundred audiocassette tapes distributed by ELNA, including tapes for Esperanto learners, recordings of Esperanto conversations, music, recordings of Esperanto congresses, and Esperanto radio broadcasts from Switzerland, Poland, and China.

Established as a pilot project in the fall of 1974, the Women’s Studies program at UMass Amherst was proposed by the Faculty Senate Committee on Women in 1973. The committee asked for a two-year mandate to develop the pilot project into a permanent program with a major and certificate minor by the fall of 1976. Despite the steady growth of the department over the next few years, the university offered minimal financial support. There were roadblocks, too, on the way to becoming a permanent program. Even after the Faculty Senate voted to approve a five-year extension of the program, university administrators continued to delay awarding the program independent degree-granting status. Finally, on April 30, 1980, the Women’s Studies Program received the approval of the Chancellor.

This collection consists of materials displayed as part of an exhibit curated by Lisa Baskin that celebrates the history of Women’s Studies Programs at UMass Amherst and in the Five Colleges, including photographs, reports, publications, and course catalogs.

Collection of chiefly newspaper clippings compiled by Georgana Foster documenting the response of the western Massachusetts community to a variety of local and national topics such as the Vietnam War, communes, the re-elections of Congressmen Silvio Conte and John Olver, the Amherst Peace Vigil, the Peace Pagoda in Leverett, and the Iraq War.

The Friends of Quabbin, Inc. was formed in 1984 as a non-profit volunteer organization dedicated to increasing public awareness and appreciation of the unique natural and historical resources of the Quabbin Reservoir and Reservation. Through educational, recreational and interpretive programs they help to protect and preserve the pristine natural beauty and the water and environmental quality of Quabbin for future generations.

The record of the Friends of Quabbin, Inc., include oral histories, printed materials, correspondence, and photographs. The organization’s oral history project captured several hundred audio and videotaped interviews with former Swift River Valley residents and people who worked on the construction of Quabbin Reservoir. Their quarterly newsletter, Quabbin Voices, is full of news, information, poetry, photos and stories from Quabbin’s past and present, as well as events that may well shape its future.

Access restrictions: Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA in advance to request materials from this collection.

Yasuko Fukumi graduated from Tsuda College in Tokyo in 1949 with a B.A. in English. From 1949 to 1952, she worked in the library of the Narimasu High and Junior High Schools, before becoming an Assistant Librarian at the American School in Japan. In 1962, Fukumi moved to the United States to pursue a graduate degree in library science at Kansas State Teachers College. She held two positions at other American libraries before joining the staff of the UMass Amherst Library as a cataloger and later as the East Asian Studies Librarian. Fukumi first discovered the Benjamin Smith Lyman Collection, housed then at the Forbes Library in Northampton, in 1979. From that time forward, she worked tirelessly to bring the collection to the attention of the faculty at UMass and to the scholarly world at large. In 1987, she mounted a campaign to raise the $200,000 necessary to purchase the collection from the Forbes Library and secure it a permanent home in the UMass Amherst Special Collection and University Archives.

Fukumi’s papers focus on her extensive research both on Benjamin Smith Lyman and on the Japanese books that comprised his collection, books now housed along with his papers at UMass Amherst. Materials include Lyman family history and genealogy, Lyman’s contributions to Japan’s coal, oil, and mineral reserves during the latter of the 19th century, and Fukumi’s bibliography of Lyman’s library. The collection also contains limited material on Fukumi’s employment at the university library and a large selection of her Haiku poems.