Collecting area: Asia

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.

An alumnus of both the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Boston College, Victor Aronow was involved with the anti-draft and anti-war movement during the Vietnam War, and the movement against U.S. involvement in Central America. Aronow was also involved with socialist, anarchist, and other leftist movements and organizations. Some of these organizations include the United States Socialist Labor Party, the Peace and Freedom Party, and the New America Movement. Most of his activism was focused in Massachusetts, but he also engaged with organizations that offered support to Central American movements in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Aronow practiced law, serving as defense counsel for Arthur Montour also called Kakwirakeron in U.S. vs. Kakwirakeron, as well as a member of the Wounded Knee Legal Defense team.

Aronow’s collection consists of a series of subject files containing magazines, books, leaflets, correspondence, clippings, newspapers, and fliers from a range of national and international leftist organizations. Aronow was a member of The Boston Draft Resistance Group, Newton Draft Counseling Center, and the American Friends Service Committee. As a member, Aronow collected files from these groups including correspondence, publications, meeting minutes, newspaper clippings, and his personal notes. While practicing law, Aronow gathered court records for cases he worked on, including both his work as a member of the Wounded Knee Legal Defense team, where he worked defending the rights of the Oglala Sioux tribe members who were involved in the attempted liberation of Wounded Knee in 1973, as well as a member of the defense counsel in U.S. vs. Kakwirakeron in 1990. The collection contains files gathered from multiple trials related to Wounded Knee including correspondence between lawyers and defendants, court records and legal filings, newsletters, press releases, funding appeals, and fliers.

A graduate of the Northfield Mount Hermon School, Wake Forest University, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst (MA, 1966), Barr Gallop Ashcraft (1940-2005) lived what he called a “gypsy” life in the late 1960s, traveling through the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, and eventually settling on a career in photojournalism. As a stringer for news organizations and magazines, he covered the war in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos from 1972 to 1975, taking other assignments throughout Asia for magazines ranging from Life to National Geographic, Newsweek, and Time. For several years, he lived in Japan, working as a teacher, but returned to Amherst to join his father in the building trade. He remained in Amherst, lecturing occasionally on his experiences as a war correspondent, until his death at his home in Shutesbury in 2005.

The Ashcraft Photograph Collection represents a small fraction of the images he took as a freelance photographer in Southeast Asia during the early 1970s. In both black and white and color prints, the collection provides stark and often graphic evidence of the destruction of the war in Vietnam, emphasizing its latter years and the period of Vietnamization, but also includes documentary work on Cambodia. The remainder of Ashcraft’s 22,000 negatives and accompanying notes were destroyed in a house fire in 1995.

Carol Barton is a popular educator and policy advocate. She co-founded Alternative Women in Development/New York in the 1990s, which was active at the UN Beijing 4th World Conference on Women and helped create the Economic Literacy Action Network (ELAN). Barton served on the economic literacy team of the International Gender and Trade Network, active in the 2000s. With elmira Nazombe, she led the Women’s International Coalition for Economic Justice (WICEJ) from 2000 through 2005. WICEJ was active in the UN Commission on the Status of Women, the World Conference Against Racism, and the Financing for Development Conference as well as the Feminist Dialogues linked to the World Social Forums in India (2004) and Brazil (2005). Currently, Barton is co-convener of the International Women in Migration Network.

elmira Nazombe has worked in the areas of popular education, social, economic and racial justice for over five decades. With a degree in urban planning, after graduation, Nazombe lived and worked for 10 years in east and southern Africa working as an urban planner and journalist. She also held positions with the All Africa Conference of Churches and the National Christian Council of Kenya. Nazombe has worked as a social justice educator for the past 25 years. She was an Executive Secretary for Racial Justice for United Methodist Women and served as the Human Rights Education Director for the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Nazombe holds a doctorate in Education (Ed.D) from Rutgers. For the last 12 years, she has been teaching social justice courses at Rutgers, hoping to nurture a new generation of social justice activists.

The collection documents Barton’s and Nazombe’s involvement in a wide range of activist and advocacy engagement both nationally and internationally, in particular with the Women’s International Coalition for Economic Justice (WICEJ). At the heart of the collection is Barton’s contribution to a collaborative effort in feminist popular education. Together with Ying Ling Leung, elmira Nazombe, Pamela Sparr, and Mariama Williams, Barton organized and facilitated popular education programs in various movements to empower women worldwide.

Born in Springfield in 1960 and raised in the Pioneer Valley, Mark A. Baszak received a bachelors degree in music composition and MEd. from UMass Amherst. Beginning shortly after completing graduate study, Baszak played a prominent part for over two decades in promoting the arts at his alma mater, serving as Acting Director of the Performing Arts Division (1987-1989), Coordinator and then Director of the Jazz in July program (1990-2008), Associate Director of Multicultural Programs (1993), and organizer of the Black Musicians Conferences and Festival (1989-1999). As an arts and culture representative of the Massachusetts Hokkaido Sister State Association in the early 1990s, Baszak helped foster exchanges between the sister states, visiting Hokkaido with the first official state delegation in 1991. Baszak died after a brief illness on September 25, 2008.

Documenting the early efforts to build upon the 1990 designation of Hokkaido and Massachusetts as sister states, the Baszak collection includes materials concentrated on the first Hokkaido Week in Amherst and the delegation that accompanied Gov. William Weld to Hokkaido in 1991. In addition to correspondence and memos, the collection includes ephemera collected by Baszak during the various ceremonies and transcripts of speeches delivered.

A pioneer in war and documentary photography, the Anglo-Greek photographer Felice Beato was an important chronicler of late-Edo and early-Meiji era Japan. Between 1863 and 1877, Beato took a stunning array of views, portraits, ethnographic images, and genre scenes and helped train the first generation of Japanese photographers.

The Beato Collection includes ten images taken by Felice Beato in Japan between 1863 and 1871, including his famous view of Daibutsu, the Great Buddha at Kotokuin Temple, Kamakura; his view of one of the residences of the Shimabara clan; two very scarce views of a farmhouse and agricultural laborers, probably taken along the Tokaido Road; two views of Yokohama; and a fine view of a naval fleet at Nagasaki.

James K. Boyce, senior fellow at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Professor Emeritus of Economics, received his B.A. from Yale University and doctorate from Oxford University. While an undergraduate, Boyce worked on a land reform and rural development program in India for two years. He completed his studies at Yale, designing an independent major in Agricultural Development, before returning to South Asia where he lived in a village in Bangladesh for a year. Out of this experience, Boyce and his partner, Betsy Hartmann, wrote and published the book, A Quiet Violence, which focused on the lives and perspectives of those who live in rural poverty. Throughout his career, he researched and wrote extensively on environmental economics. When Boyce joined the faculty at UMass Amherst in 1985, he established the first economics course on the topic called “the political economy of the environment.” During his first sabbatical in the 1990s, Boyce was a Fulbright Scholar at the Universidad Nacional in Costa Rica, where he helped establish a master’s program in sustainable development and ecological economics for Central America and the Caribbean. In addition to his focus on environmental economics, Boyce was active in the economics of violent conflict and peacebuilding. He traveled to El Salvadore soon after the signing of the peace accords and was asked to lead the Adjustment Toward Peace project for the United Nations Development Program. Boyce continues to write about topics related to political economy and climate policy.

The collection is a rich resource documenting Boyce’s research and professional contributions that include work on: South Asia with emphasis on irrigation and flood control; Africa; the Philippines; environmental topics such as climate policy, crop genetic diversity, Natural Assets Project, Toxic 100, Costa Rica; and peacebuilding, in particular in El Salvador. Publications and reports are contextualized within the collection through correspondence, drafts of writings, conference proceedings, and extensive notes and notebooks including those created on visits to Bangladesh.

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

A long time teacher in the schools in Amherst, Mass., Marybeth Bridegam operated tour agency, Cross-Culture Inc., from the late 1980s through early 2000s. Cross-Culture ran small-group tours of locations around the world led by local tour leaders and specialized guides that were distinguished by itineraries that included sites outside the usual tourist routes.

The Bridegam collection consists of thousands of images taken by Bridegam during her travels, many in preparation for Cross Culture tour groups. Locations include China, Japan, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia, and Russia.

Printers and bibliographers use a bevy of terms to refer to works printed on one side (or sometimes both sides) of a single sheet, classified primarily by size. From large to small, posters, broadsides, and fliers refer to works used to convey a more or less focused message to an audience, often using illustrations or inventive typography to grab the attention.

Posters from Communist world, with an emphasis on the political and cultural transformations of the late 1980s through mid-1990s. The majority of posters originated in the Soviet Union, although there are examples from East Germany, China, and elsewhere.

Two years after graduating from Massachusetts Agricultural College in 1875, William Penn Brooks accepted an invitation from the Japanese government — and his mentor, William Smith Clark — to help establish the Sapporo Agricultural School. Spending over a decade in Hokkaido, Brooks helped to introduce western scientific agricultural practices and the outlines of a program in agricultural education, and he built a solid foundation for the School. After his return to the states in 1888, he earned a doctorate at the University of Halle, Germany, and then accepted a position at his alma mater, becoming a leading figure at the Massachusetts Experiment Station until his retirement in 1921.

Brooks’ papers consist of correspondence, photographs, newspaper clippings, an account book, and translations which provide rich detail on Brooks’ life in Japan, the development of Sapporo Agricultural College (now Hokkaido University), and practical agricultural education in the post-Civil War years.