Collecting area: Arts & literature

The Linguistic Atlas of New England project, begun in 1889 and published 1939-1943, documented two major dialect areas of New England, which are related to the history of the settling and dispersal of European settlers in New England with successive waves of immigration.

The collection contains handwritten transcription sheets (carbon copies) in the International Phonetic Alphabet, with some explanatory comments in longhand. Drawn from over 400 interviews conducted by linguists in communities throughout New England in the 1930s, these records document the geographic distribution of variant pronunciations and usages of spoken English. The material, taken from fieldworkers’ notebooks (1931-1933), is arranged by community, then by informant, and also includes audiotapes of follow-up interviews (1934); phonological analyses of informants’ speech; character sketches of informants by fieldworkers; fieldworkers’ blank notebook; and mimeograph word index to the atlas (1948).

Born on April 15, 1919 in Baltimore, Maryland to David and Minnie Lipshires, Sidney was raised in Northampton, Massachusetts where his father owned two shoe stores, David Boot Shop and The Bootery. He attended the Massachusetts State College for one year before transferring to the University of Chicago and was awarded a BA in economics in 1940. His years at the University of Chicago were transformative, Lipshires became politically active there and joined the Communist Party in 1939. Following graduation in 1941, he married Shirley Dvorin, a student in early childhood education; together they had two sons, Ellis and Bernard. Lipshires returned to western Massachusetts with his young family in the early 1940s, working as a labor organizer. He served in the United States Army from 1943 to 1946 working as a clerk and interpreter with a medical battalion in France for over a year. Returning home, he ran for city alderman in Springfield on the Communist Party ticket in 1947. Lipshires married his second wife, Joann Breen Klein, in 1951 and on May 29, 1956, the same day his daughter Lisa was born, he was arrested under the Smith Act for his Communist Party activities. Before his case was brought to trial, the Smith Act was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. Disillusioned with the Communist Party, he severed his ties with it in 1957, but continued to remain active in organized labor for the rest of his life. Earning his masters in 1965 and Ph.D. in 1971, Lipshires taught history at Manchester Community College in Connecticut for thirty years. During that time he worked with other campus leaders to establish a statewide union for teachers and other community college professionals, an experience he wrote about in his book, Giving Them Hell: How a College Professor Organized and Led a Successful Statewide Union. Sidney Lipshires died on January 6, 2011 at the age of 91.

Ranging from an autobiographical account that outlines his development as an activist (prepared in anticipation of a trial for conspiracy charges under the Smith Act) to drafts and notes relating to his book Giving Them Hell, the Sidney Lipshires Papers offers an overview of his role in the Communist Party and as a labor organizer. The collection also contains his testimony in a 1955 public hearing before the Special Commission to Study and Investigate Communism and Subversive Activities, photographs, and biographical materials.

Jazz musician and collector George G. Loring, known as Gid, played the cornet with a number of bands including his own (Gid’s Giddy Gang), especially after retiring from a career in the financial industry. Although he never considered himself a professional musician, he kept busy playing professional and semi-professional gigs and casual jam sessions in the Boston area, occasionally in his own home in Manchester, Mass. In addition to jazz, he played swing and Dixieland. Also dedicated to the environment, he was a founder of the Manchester Conservation Trust in 1963.

This collection contains an assortment of material relating to and describing jazz music and performances mainly from the 1940s through the 1960s, including collections of letters by musicians Jim Wheaton and James Weaver (mostly written in the early 1990s), notes about Boston Jazz Society performances, and ephemera including programs and clippings, with an emphasis on Louis Armstrong.

An historian and photographer, Allan I. Ludwig’s book Graven Images: New England Stonecarving and Its Symbols, 1650-1815 (1966) played a critical role in the rise in interest in gravestone studies in the 1960s. Born in Yonkers, N.Y., in 1933, Ludwig received his PhD in art history from Yale in 1964 and became involved with the Association for Gravestone Studies beginning with the initial Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife in 1976. He received the AGS Forbes Award in 1980 in recognition of his contributions to gravestone studies. He has been a professor of art history at Dickinson College, Bloomfield College, Rhode Island School of Design, Yale University, and Syracuse University. In addition to his books Reflections Out of Time: A Portfolio of Photographs (1981) and Repulsion: Aesthetics of the Grotesque (1986), Ludwig has curated numerous art exhibitions and exhibited his own photographs worldwide.

The Ludwig Collection consists of many hundreds of photographs of New England and English gravemarkers organized either by the deceased’s name or by the town, as well as copies of all photos used in Graven Images. Also included in the collection is a copy of Ludwig’s dissertation on gravestone iconography and offprints of several of his articles.

The descendants of Joseph Lyman (1767-1847) flourished in nineteenth century Northampton, Mass., achieving social prominence, financial success, and a degree of intellectual acclaim. Having settled in Northampton before 1654, just a generation removed from emigration, the Lymans featured prominently in the development of the Connecticut River Valley. A Yale-educated clerk of the Hampshire County courts, Joseph’s descendants included sons Joseph Lyman (an engineer and antislavery man) and Samuel Fowler Lyman (a jurist), and three Harvard-educated grandsons, Benjamin Smith Lyman (a geologist and traveler in Meiji-era Japan) and brothers Joseph and Frank Lyman (both trained in the natural sciences).

Consisting of the scattered correspondence and photographic record of three generations of an intellectually adventurous Northampton family, the Lyman collection explores the ebb and flow of family relations, collegiate education, and educational travel in Europe during the mid-nineteenth century, with important content on antislavery and the Free State movement in Kansas. Although the family’s tendency to reuse names (repeatedly) presents a challenge in distinguishing the various recipients, the focal points of the collection include the geologist Benjamin Smith Lyman, his uncle Joseph (1812-1871), cousins Joseph (1851-1883) and Frank, and Frank’s son Frank Lyman, Jr. Antislavery is a major theme in the letters of Samuel F. Lyman to his son Benjamin, and in the letterbook of the Kansas Land Trust, an affiliate of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, of which the elder Joseph was Treasurer.

A native of Northampton, Massachusetts, Benjamin Smith Lyman was a prominent geologist and mining engineer. At the request of the Meiji government in Japan, Lyman helped introduce modern geological surveying and mining techniques during the 1870s and 1880s, and his papers from that period illuminate aspects of late nineteenth century Japan, New England, and Pennsylvania, as well as the fields of geology and mining exploration and engineering. From his earliest financial records kept as a student at Phillips Exeter Academy through the journal notations of his later days in Philadelphia, Lyman’s meticulous record-keeping provides much detail about his life and work. Correspondents include his classmate, Franklin B. Sanborn, a friend of the Concord Transcendentalists and an active social reformer, abolitionist, and editor.

The papers, 1848-1911, have been organized into nine series: correspondence, financial records, writings, survey notebooks, survey maps, photographs, student notes and notebooks, collections, and miscellaneous (total 25 linear feet). A separate Lyman collection includes over 2,000 books in Japanese and Chinese acquired by Lyman, and in Western languages pertaining to Asia.

As a journalist with the Boston Globe, a news commentator on WGBH television, and Curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, Louis M. Lyons was an important public figure in the New England media for over fifty years. A 1918 graduate of Massachusetts Agricultural College and later trustee of UMass Amherst, Lyons was an vocal advocate for freedom of the press and a highly regarded commentator on the evolving role of media in American society.

The Lyons Papers contain a selection of correspondence, lectures, and transcripts of broadcasts relating primarily to Lyons’ career in television and radio. From the McCarthy era through the end of American involvement in Vietnam, Lyons addressed topics ranging from local news to international events, and the collection offers insight into transformations in American media following the onset of television and reaction both in the media and the public to events such as the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the war in Vietnam, and the social and political turmoil of the 1960s.

Paul Lyons

Paul Lyons was a passionate teacher, historian, writer, activist, and musician. He was born in 1942 into a lower middle-class Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey and attended Weequahic High School. He earned his undergraduate degree in history from Rutgers University in 1964. He then continued at Rutgers where he began studying law. After hearing a speech by Bayard Rustin, he quit law school to become a teacher and civil rights activist, participating in campus protests as part of the anti-Vietnam War movement. Between receiving his master’s degree in history at Rutgers in 1967 and his PhD in Social Work from Bryn Mawr College in 1980, Lyons taught history at Temple University and The Miquon Upper School, an independent middle and high school located in Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia, PA. He spent the bulk of his career teaching at Stockton University in New Jersey. While at Stockton, Lyons was involved in his union, and played saxophone and sang in the Stockton Faculty Band. He also helped establish The Sara and Sam Schoffer Holocaust Research Center.

During his career he published 5 books: Philadelphia Communists, 1936-1956 (1982); Class of ’66 (1994); New Left, New Right; The Legacy of the Sixties (1996), The People of This Generation (2003); and American Conservatism: Thinking It, Teaching It (2009). A historian of the Left, Lyons spent his career attempting to grapple with the successes and failures of the New Left in the United States during the latter part of the 20th Century. Literature on the New Left was long dominated by top-down narratives focusing on major organizations and their leaders. Lyons’ People of This Generation (Temple UP, 2003) was significant in that it presented a far different view of the movement as a neighborhood-level case study of the grassroots. His book American Conservatism: Thinking It, Teaching It grappled with the history/intellectual traditions of conservatism in America through the experience of teaching an interdisciplinary senior seminar in the spring of 2006. Much of his research focused on the teaching of social justice and present day events, such as 911, within the classroom. He was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, The Observer and The Journal of Historical Society.

Lyons was married to Mary Hardwick and had three children: a son, Max Lyons , step-daughter, Jenn Zelnick, and step-son, Nate Zelnick. He passed away at the age of 67 in 2009.

This small collection of published and unpublished papers assembles several of Lyons’ articles for publication including: Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, and The Journal of Historical Society. Also included is a draft of an unpublished memoir, a copy of his 1980 master’s thesis The Communist as Organizer: The Philadelphia Experience, 1936-1956, drafts of American Conservatism, speeches given at anti-Iraq War rallies, and a draft of a manuscript entitled The Last Socialist in America. It also includes his poetry and other assorted writings. Many of these writings reflect his lifelong areas of interest such as the history of the Left and the rise of conservatism in the U.S. Also included are several articles from journals and web outlets that address September 11th, the Iraq war, teaching, John F. Kennedy, the 1960s, patriotism, and more.

In the 1950s, William P. MacConnell (Class of 1943), and his photogrammetry students in the Dept. of Forestry began using aerial photography to map forests, agricultural fields, wetlands, and other land cover in Massachusetts. Their work was eventually expanded to include the mapping of all land use for Massachusetts, making this state the first in the nation to be completely mapped in this fashion, and laying the foundation for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Wetlands Inventory.

The MacConnell Collection includes a comprehensive set of stereopair photographs derived from multiple transects of the state taken between 1950 and 2000. In addition to some original field notes, a stereoscope, and other project materials, the collection includes the following series:

• 1951: Massachusetts, black and white prints (1:20,000 scale)
• 1971: Massachusetts, black and white prints (1:20,000)
• 1985: Massachusetts and Rhode Island, infrared transparencies (1:25,000)
• 1990: Boston, Cape Cod, Buzzard’s Bay, infrared transparencies (1:12,000)
• 1991-1992: Massachusetts, infrared transparencies (1:40,000)
• 1991-1992: Merrimack River Valley, North Shore, MDC-1, infrared transparencies (1:12,000)
• 1993: Massachusetts, Cape Cod, MDC-2, Nantucket, Dukes and Plymouth Counties, Naushon, West Metro, infrared transparencies (1:12,000)
• 1999: Massachusetts. infrared transparencies and prints (1:25,000)

We are in the process of digitizing the aerial photographs — the 1951-1952 photographs are currently available online. Use the searchable map index to find all available digital images.

The Red Cross played an important relief role in Yugoslavia, helping the still volatile region recover from the devastation of the Second World War.

The sketches and essays in this scrapbook, accompanied by a handful of photographs, were apparently made by grade school students in Skopje, Macedonia, just after the Second World War. The images depict the city, countryside, and people, with a handful of more abstract designs. Red Cross imagery is prominent throughout. Although the provenance of the album is uncertain, it seems possible that it was assembled to pay homage to the organization’s relief efforts.