Collecting area: Arts & literature

Playwright, poet, historian, student theater director and professor of English, University of Massachusetts.

Correspondence, speeches, lectures, drafts of writings, reviews, publicity material, programs and playbills, scrapbooks, grade books (1917-1959), newsclippings, memorabilia, and other papers, relating to Rand’s teaching career, his writing of poetry, plays, and history, and his activities, as a dramatic coach and director. Includes material relating to the dedication of Rand Theater.

Listen to oral history with Rand's wife:
Oral history, part 1
Oral history, part 2

A long-time historian at UMass Amherst, Jane Meyer Rausch was widely recognized for her work on the frontier history of Colombia. A graduate of DePauw University (1962), Rausch joined a growing program in Latin American studies at UMass in 1969, shortly after receiving her doctorate in comparative tropical history from the University of Wisconsin Madison. The recipient of a Fulbright Award in 1987, she taught widely in the history of Latin America and the Caribbean, and wrote four major monographs on the Colombian frontier in the colonial and national periods: A Tropical Plains Frontier : the Llanos of Colombia, 1531-1831 (1984); The Llanos Frontier in Colombian history, 1830-1930 (1993); Colombia : Territorial Rule and the Llanos Frontier (1999); and From Frontier Town to Metropolis: A History of Villavicencio, Colombia, Since 1842 (2007).

Centered on the research and teaching, this collection documents the career of Jane Rausch from her days as a graduate student in the late 1960s through her retirement. In addition to a range of professional correspondence, unpublished works, teaching materials, and student notes, the collection includes several hundred 35mm slides taken by Rausch while traveling in Colombia.

The independent filmmaker Abraham Ravett has taught film and video at Hampshire College since 1979. Born in Poland in 1947 and raised in Israel, Ravett emigrated to the United States with his family in 1955. Since earning his BFA and MFA in Filmmaking and Photography, he has won wide recognition for his work, receiving major grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation, among other organizations, and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. His films have been screened internationally and have earned Top Prize at the Viennale 2000, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Onion City Film/Video Festival.

This small collection contains raw footage on open-reel videotape shot by Ravett and two dvds documenting local communities in eastern Massachusetts: the North End, Boston (1977-1978) and Haverhill High School (1978-1979), the latter taken while artist in residence.

Herman Edgar Ray, son of Fred Jackson Ray and Mabel Cosella Merriam Ray, was born in Westminster, Massachusetts on May 28, 1911. Herman Edgar married Anita Crabtree on May 4, 1934 in Gardner, Massachusetts. The family remained in the area throughout the 1950s as indicated by their correspondence.

The collection consists primarily of family photographs spanning three identifiable generations of the Ray family, and contains photograph albums, formal portraits, and miscellaneous photographs. Additional material includes postcards, correspondence, and hand-made greeting cards. The materials document the childhood of Herman Edgar Ray. His extended family includes: Mr. and Mrs. Edwin Ray, Mr. and Mrs. Hiram Ray, Ray Fenno, Mary Emergene Fenno, Mr.and Mrs. Charles A. Smith, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Davis, Helen Gates, Mary Russell, and Eleanor Howe.

The founder of the firm Rheingold, Giuffra, Ruffo, and Plotkin LLP, attorney Paul Rheingold is a graduate of Oberlin College and Harvard Law School. In practice since 1958, he is known for taking a leadership role in mass tort litigation. He is a member of the bar in New York, Massachusetts, and D.C., as well as the U.S. Federal Court.

Outside of his legal work, Paul Rheingold was an avid collector of historic photographs. His collection of nearly 55,000 items consists primarily of images mounted on heavy card stock and dating primarily from the 1860s to the 1930s. The exceptional range of subject matter and location is reflected in Rheingold’s extensive classification scheme, which SCUA has retained, and offers an important perspective on U.S. cultural history and the history of photography.

A graduate of UMass Amherst (’71) and the son of a faculty member, Jim Ricci had a childhood encounter with a Locke Power Lawn Mower that led to lifelong fascination with reel lawn mowers. As an historian ofthe field, Ricci has written extensively on mowers and the industy, culminating in his book Hand, Horse, and Motor: The Development of the Lawn Mower Industry in the United States (2016). He and his wife Margaret McCarthy are also advanced collectors of vintage lawn mowers and associated paper and ephemera.

The Ricci and McCarthy collection cuts a wide swath through the subject of pre-World War II lawn mowers, and includes materials ranging from scarce catalogs, trade publications, and letters and documents, as well as Ricci’s extensive research files organized by manufacturer. The collection is rich in visual content, with early tradecards, advertisements, postcards, and photographs.

Maida Leonard Riggs, class of 1936, taught women’s physical education at UMass before shifting to teacher preparation. Riggs was a beloved member of the UMass faculty for 28 years before her retirement. An adventurous spirit took Riggs around the globe: to Europe with the Red Cross during World War II; as a bicycling tour leader after the war; on a trek across Nepal at age 62; to Russia, China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Uzbekistan. After retiring, Riggs, a self-described compulsive traveler, embarked on a more personal journey to explore her roots. Riggs transcribed more than 250 letters by her pioneer great-grandmother, Mary Ann Clark Longley, and published them under the title A Small Bit of Bread and Butter: Letters from the Dakota Territory, 1832-1869, an absorbing and sometimes heartbreaking account of life on the frontier. An avid photographer, Riggs took advantage of any opportunity to use her camera. These images, particularly from World War II, tell as many stories as do her correspondence. Her memoir, Dancing in Paratrooper Boots, contains typed copies of her letters from her days as a Red Cross volunteer during the war.

The Riggs Papers are a rich documentary history of the World War II era, both in America and Europe, as well as an engrossing study (in transcripts) of the American frontier. Included with extensive correspondence and photographs are published and unpublished prose, and Lovingly, Lucy: Vignettes of a Pioneer Woman’s Life, an essay on Riggs’s paternal grandmother, Lucy Dodge Riggs. Additional items in the collection include handwritten journals, one detailing a trip to China and Japan in 1982, and Riggs’s photographs of young children at play taken for her book on child development, Jump to Joy: Helping Children Grow Through Active Play. Riggs also took her genealogical research seriously, meticulously charting her family’s 1638 immigration from England to Massachusetts. With camera in hand, she later traveled to England in search of more evidence of the Longleys’ English roots.

Born in Germany on Aug. 4, 1934, Hans Joachim Ring was a film enthusiast with an encyclopedic knowledge of German cinema. During the Second World War, movie theatres became a refuge for the young boy, whose family was forced several times to flee due to Allied bombing. The hardships of post-war life cemented the role of film in his life and as he grew older, he became an ardent collector of materials relating to film.

The Ring Collection includes hundreds of programs, fliers, and handbills published by the official East German film distributors Progress Film-Vertrieb and the Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA) and sold to patrons at theatres. This extraordinary assemblage includes several hundred programs covering the immediate post-war period (1945-1950) and hundreds more relating to films released up to and beyond the end of the Communist era. Offering insight into the evolution of graphic design in East Germany and the marketing of film, the collection is one of the largest of its kind in the United States.

The protistologist Hope T. Ritter (1919-2007) is recognized for his important research on the evolution of mitosis. A native of Allentown, Pa., Ritter received his doctorate at Lehigh University in 1955 for a study of the gut fauna in a subterranean termite. Building on this research during the 1950s, he became the first scientist to successfully culture Barbulanympha, a hindgut flagellate symbiont of the wood-eating cockroach Cryptocercus, which has since become a model organism for study of the evolution of mitosis. After teaching at Harvard (1957-1961) and SUNY Buffalo, Ritter moved to the University of Georgia in 1966, where he remained until his retirement from teaching in 1987.

The Ritter Papers contain valuable professional correspondence, lab notebooks, and a large number of electron micrographs documenting his research.

Rob Okun, in his office.

Rob Okun is a progressive social activist, writer, and editor who has worked for equality between men and women for over 50 years. Following his awakening to the preponderance of men in leadership roles throughout the anti-Vietnam War movement, he became interested in feminism, masculinity, and gender inequality. He began to work towards promoting healthy ideas of masculinity and challenging harmful stereotypes about men through his work with Steven Botkin and the Men’s Resource Center (MRC), which was founded by Botkin in Amherst, Mass in 1982. Okun was the editor of Voice Male, the newsletter of the MRC, and also served as Executive Director. Following Voice Male’s transition to an independent magazine, he remained its editor. In addition to his work with the MRC and Voice Male, he edited the book Voice Male – The Untold Story of the Profeminist Men’s Movement which was released in 2017 and has written op-eds and commentaries in newspapers and on websites. His writing is syndicated by Peace Voice and has appeared in The San Diego Union Tribune, The Daily Hampshire Gazette, Boston Globe, Albany Times Union, Alternet, Ms., Counterpunch, Women’s eNews and more.

In addition to his work with the MRC and Voice Male, Okun served as Director of the nearly decade-long traveling art exhibition, book, and documentary film project known as Unknown Secrets – Art & the Rosenberg Era. The project dealt with the origins of the Cold War through the story of the arrest, trial, and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs were convicted of conspiring to pass atom bomb secrets to the Soviet Union and were both electrocuted in June of 1953. The tragedy was examined in the exhibit via the images and words of dozens of artists such as Picasso, Sue Coe, Arthur Miller, David Wojnarowicz, Adrienne Rich, and many others. Okun coordinated showings of the exhibit, fundraised, was the editor of the book about the exhibit, and was a co-producer/director of a 30 minute documentary film, produced by Green Mountain Post Films. A Zoom celebration of Rob’s career at the Men’s Resource Center and as editor of Voice Male magazine was held in January of 2024 and is available via You Tube.

Okun’s papers document his extensive efforts related to the Rosenberg era art exhibit through correspondence with galleries, project members, universities, donors, artists, advisory board members, and funding agencies, as well as grant proposals, posters, photographs, drafts, clippings, press releases, pamphlets, and more. The collection also includes copies of the Rosenberg anthology.

Okun’s work with the Men’s Resource Center and Voice Male is represented through clippings, correspondence, photographs, pamphlets, writings, drafts, and more. Copies of the magazine—from its newsletter days up through its redesign as a four-color magazine, and copies of the Voice Male anthology—are also part of the collection.