Collecting area: Arts & literature

An avid collector of Robert Frost, Benjamin F. Lewis was born in Boston, on 23, 1941, to Leo and Anne (Starr) Lewis, Benjamin Lewis. Lewis enjoyed a distinguished career as a social worker, an adminstrator, a researcher in drug and alcohol abuse, and on the AIDS epidemic, working in his latter years as a member of the Department of Psychiatry at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Lewis died on Jan. 29, 2019, leaving his life partner Karen Orsini and two children. While working at Goodspeeds in Boston as a college student, Lewis was presented with a Robert Frost first edition, beginning a lifelong collecting habit.

The collection assembled by Lewis includes first and early editions of Frost’s books (many inscribed), early printings and later (life-time) editions of most, selected first appearances of his poetry in magazines and anthologies, scarce ephemeral printings of his work and association pieces, a handful of letters and holograph poems, and phonograph recordings of Frost reading his own work.

The historian David Levering Lewis is the author of eight remarkably diverse monographs. Raised in an academic family, his father was president of Morris Brown College, Lewis enrolled at Fisk University at the age of 15 and was only 26 when he was awarded a doctorate in modern European history from the London School of Economics (1962). Through an academic career that has included numerous stops, including Morgan State, Notre Dame, Howard, the University of the District of Columbia (1970-1980), and Rutgers (1985-2003), Lewis remained consistently productive. Author of the first academic biography of Martin Luther King (1970) and a history of the Dreyfus Affair (1974), he wrote an influential study of the Harlem renaissance (1981) and important works on colonialism in Africa (1987) and Islamic Spain (2008), but he is best known for his two monumental biographies of W.E.B. Du Bois (1993, 2000), each of which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. One of the most lauded African American historians of his generation, Lewis was recipient of the Bancroft Prize, the Francis Parkman Prizes, the 2009 National Humanities Medal, and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and he was elected as a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Lewis was Julius Silver University Professor in History at New York University from 2003 until his retirement.

The papers of David Levering Lewis document a long and productive career as an academic historian and scholar of African American history and culture. Beginning with his years in college and graduate school, the collection offers a rich perspective on the evolution of his career. Lewis’s essential biographies of W.E.B. Du Bois are particularly well documented, however the collection includes abundant materials for each of his earlier projects, including correspondence, research notes, and drafts.

Overcoming a deeply impoverished childhood, Gertrude Lewis struggled to build a career in education, putting herself through college and graduate school. At the age of 32, she earned a bachelor’s degree from Ohio State, continuing on to a masters degree at New York University (1933), and finally, at age 51, a PhD from Yale (1947). For many years after receiving her doctorate, Lewis was employed as a Specialist for Upper Grades with the U.S. Office of Education in Washington. Among other career highlights, Lewis spent two years in Japan (1950-1951) as a Consultant in Elementary Education in the Education Section of the Allied Occupation government (SCAP). Lewis outlived her life partner, Ruth Totman, dying at home on December 10, 1996, a few months after her one hundredth birthday.

The Lewis Papers document the work and life of an educator of the masses, a traveler of the world, and a woman of the twentieth century. Documents pertaining to her work as an educator of both young students and veteran teachers show the changes within the theory and practice of pedagogy over time, over various geographic locales, and also highlight her role in that change. This collection also documents the numerous on-going side projects on which Lewis worked, including fostering creativity in schoolchildren, a biography of Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt, and her own poetry and prose.

A co-founder of the Valley Women’s Center and the Everywoman’s Center at UMass Amherst, Patricia Lee Lewis has been an important part of the vibrant activist culture in the Pioneer Valley since her graduation from Smith College in 1970, advocating for women, civil rights, peace, the environment, for small farms and rural communities, and for art. Her varied career has included service as Supervisor of Community Development for the Massachusetts Office for Children (1974-1976), as Rural Development Specialist for the Massachusetts Cooperative Extension Service, and as County Commissioner for Hampshire County (1984-1988). After receiving an MFA from Vermont College, she founded Patchwork Farm Writing Retreat in Westhampton in 1992, which offers workshops and retreats in creative writing and yoga.

As a member of a National Women’s Delegation, Lewis visited the People’s Republic of China in 1977. Having been invited by the All China Women’s Federation, Lewis and her colleagues toured the country, seeing the sights and examining the role of women, education, and agriculture, visiting Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Tachai, and Guilin. The many hundreds of photographs she took during the tour are a powerful visual record of the country only a few months after the Gage of Four were arrested and the Cultural Revolution declared ended. The collection also includes approximately 100 photographs taken of agriculture and rural life in Louisiana and Texas in 1979.

A member of the Polish community in Southbridge, Mass., John Libera (1919-2007) was a long-time employee of American Optical Company, but was best known as a promoter of polka music and dancing. A performer, song writer, and host of a radio show for over thirty years, Libera was inducted into the Polka Music Hall of Fame in 1982 and invited to perform at the American Folklife Festival in 1988.

The Libera collection consists of four photographs of the Polish community in Southbridge during the 1930s along with fourteen photos, a videotape, and some correspondence and ephemera relating to the American Folklife Festival.

In 1967, Marshall Bloom and Raymond Mungo, former editors of the student newspapers of Amherst College and Boston University, were fired from the United States Student Press Association for their radical views. In response they collaborated with colleagues and friends to found the Liberation News Service, an alternative news agency aimed at providing inexpensive images and text reflecting a countercultural outlook. From its office in Washington, D.C., LNS issued twice-weekly packets containing news articles, opinion pieces, and photographs reflecting a radical perspective on the war in Vietnam, national liberation struggles abroad, American politics, and the cultural revolution. At its height, the Service had hundreds of subscribers, spanning the gamut of college newspapers and the underground and alternative press. Its readership was estimated to be in the millions.

Two months after moving to New York City in June 1968, the LNS split into two factions. The more traditional Marxist activists remained in New York, while Bloom and Mungo, espousing a broader cultural view, settled on farms in western Massachusetts and southern Vermont. The story of LNS, as well as of the split, is told in Mungo’s 1970 classic book Famous Long Ago. By 1969 Bloom’s LNS farm, though still holding the organization’s original press, had begun its long life as a farm commune in Montague, Mass. Montague (whose own story is told in Steve Diamond’s What the Trees Said) survived in its original form under a number of resident groups until its recent sale to another non-profit organization. Mungo’s Packer Corners Farm, near Brattleboro, the model for his well-known book, Total Loss Farm, survives today under the guidance of some of its own original founders.

The LNS Records include a relatively complete run of LNS packets 1-120 (1967-1968), along with business records, miscellaneous correspondence, some artwork, and printing artifacts, including the LNS addressograph.

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.

In 1970, just fourteen years-old, Bill Lichtenstein began working as a volunteer on the listener line at WBCN-FM in Boston, moving up to become a newscaster and announcer and helping to pioneer the station’s innovative on-air sound with montages of actualities, music, and comedy. As his media career developed over the next forty years, Lichtenstein built a wide reputation as a journalist and documentary producer for ABC News, working as an investigative producer on shows such as 20/20, World News Tonight, and Nightline, and since 1990, he has operated as president of his own production company, Lichtenstein Creative Media. With LCMedia, Lichtenstein has received more than 60 major broadcast honors including a Peabody Award, U.N. Media Award, eight National Headliner Awards, the Cine Golden Eagle, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his documentary West 47th Street was selected as winner of the Atlanta Film Festival. A graduate of Brown University and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, Lichtenstein has served on the faculty of the New School University (1979-2005) and he writes regularly on media, politics, and health for publications ranging from the Huffington Post to the New York Times, the Nation, Newsday, Boston Globe, Village Voice, Entertainment Weekly, and TV Guide.

The Lichtenstein Collection consists of a growing array of materials gathered in preparation of the documentary film, WBCN and the American Revolution, which explores the cultural and political impact of WBCN. These include audio tapes of WBCN broadcasts, news reports and stories, photographs and ephemera of social change in Boston during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and two WBCN documentaries: Danny Schechter’s Jamaica: An Island in Crisis (1976) and What Is News (1973), produced by Schechter and Lichtenstein.

Julia Lieblich seated (left) on a bench with a notebook listening to Kaqchikel Maya actress Maria Mercedes Coroy (center) and unidentified person

Julia Lieblich was a human rights journalist and author who spent much of her career exploring the effects of war, abuse, trauma, war, despair, and terror to shed a light on these horrific acts in an effort to make the world a better place. Through reporting and books, she tackled difficult subjects like the wars in Bosnia and Afghanistan, conflict zones in Guatemala and Sierra Leone, the truth and reconciliation commission in South Africa, and clergy sex abuse in Chicago. Lieblich had deep empathy for her subjects and stayed in touch with many of them long after her stories and books were published. She became a godmother to five children in San Antonia Aguas Calientes, Guatemala and visited her adopted family twice a year over the course of 25 years. As a religion reporter and Jewish woman, she explored conflicts in Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and Catholicism. She taught writing and was an assistant professor at Loyola University Chicago, a research fellow at Northwestern University Law School’s Center for International Human Rights, and a scholar-in-residence at the Newberry Library in Chicago.

Lieblich was born on April 25, 1958 in Long Island, NY. Later, her family moved to St. Louis, MN. She attended the Interlochen Arts Academy boarding school in Michigan and received her Bachelor’s degree in literature at Washington University and a master’s in theological studies from Harvard Divinity School. During her career as a journalist she was a religion writer for the Chicago Tribune and the Associated Press, and published news and feature articles in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Boston Globe, Miami Herald, Plain Dealer, Time, Life, Ms., Fortune, The Nation, American Health, American Photo, Harvard Business Review, Harvard Divinity Bulletin and Agni literary review. She also wrote op-eds for the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post and others. In her twenties, she oversaw the annual billionaire’s issue for Fortune by day, while writing about nuns who had taken a vow of poverty by night. Her first book, Sisters: Lives of Devotion and Defiance about cloistered Roman Catholic nuns, was originally published as an article in the New York Times Magazine. Her other book, Wounded I Am More Awake: Finding Meaning After Terror which was co-authored with Esad Boskailo, about Bosnian concentration camps, was published in 2012.

Lieblich struggled with a bipolar disorder for much of her life and in November of 2023, feeling overwhelmed by “wars that are killing children, a refugee and housing crisis, the murder of young people on our own streets, the increasing threat of nuclear war and climate change”, she ended her own life. In her final note to friends, she stated that she could no longer handle more sadness, death and destruction and “just wanted the pain to stop”. Her ashes were scattered on the grave of her goddaughter, Kendy Carmona outside of Antigua in Guatemala.

Lieblich’s papers document the working life of a career journalist. Besides copies of many, if not all, of the articles she published, there are letters, notes, research materials, drafts, and interview transcripts gathered throughout her life. The collection also contains a book proposal that Lieblich wrote in 2023 before she died called The Sacred in the Ordinary: Spiritual Teachers of a Secular Traveler that was intended to describe her spiritual journey as a secular woman as she encountered remarkable teachers from many traditions. It was intended to be a “book of stories that address the questions and themes that have animated my quest for meaning during my thirty years as a secular religion writer.” In addition, the collection contains personal photographs, artwork, and audio and video recordings of interviews.

A 1969 graduate of Smith College and member of Students for a Democratic Society, Sandy Lillydahl took part in the second contingent of the Venceremos Brigade. Between February and April 1970, Lillydahl and traveled to Cuba as an expression of solidarity with the Cuban people and to assist in the sugarcane harvest.

The 35 color snapshots that comprise the Lillydahl collection document the New England contingent of the second Venceremos Brigade as they worked the sugarcane fields in Aguacate, Cuba, and toured the country. Each image is accompanied by a caption supplied by Lillydahl in 2005, describing the scene and reflecting on her experiences; and the collection also includes copies of the file kept by the FBI on Lillydahl, obtained by her through the Freedom of Information Act in 1975.