Collecting area: Arts & literature

Born in Grinnell, Iowa on July 14, 1914, to Eva Craig and Lee Augustus Renfrow, Edith Renfrow Smith was the first African American woman to graduate from Grinnell College in 1937. She moved to Chicago after graduation where she worked first at the YMCA and later at the University of Chicago. In 1940, Edith married Henry T. Smith; the couple welcomed two daughters: Virginia and Alice. After earning her teaching license, she taught in the Chicago school system for twenty-one years before retiring in 1976. Smith continued to serve as a volunteer well into her nineties. She is the recipient of numerous honors highlighting her activities and contributions later in life, including admittance into the Chicago Senior Citizen Hall of Fame, selection as a “superager” in a Northwestern University study, induction into the Iowa African American Hall of Fame,  and several distinctions awarded by Grinnell College: an honorary degree, the naming of the Smith Gallery in Joe Rosenfield Campus Center, and the naming of a new residential hall building on campus.  An illustrated biography of her life, No One is Better than You: Edith Renfrow Smith and the Power of a Mother’s Words, was published in January 2024.

While the physical materials that comprise the Edith Renfrow Smith Papers are small in number, including an award, photographs, and a family tree, the collection is enhanced by nearly 150 digitized photographs scanned and posted online by Grinnell College.

Stored offsite; contact SCUA to request materials from this collection.

Born and raised in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, Keith Harmon Snow earned his Master’s in microwave engineering at UMass Amherst. He worked at General Electric Company but left the security of his job soon after receiving a promotion in order to pursue travel and a career in investigative journalism. As a photojournalist and war correspondent, Snow worked extensively in Central Africa. He served as a genocide investigator for Survivors Rights International, Genocide Watch, and the United Nations, documenting and exposing genocide and crimes against humanity in Sudan and Ethiopia. Snow won three Project Censored awards, and in 2009, he was named the Regent’s Lecturer in Law & Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara, recognized for over a decade of work on war crimes. A champion for human rights and the rights of children around the world, Snow’s book, The Worst Interests of the Child: The Trafficking of Children and Parents Through U.S. Family Courts, was published in 2015. Snow died on December 8, 2024.

The papers of Keith Harmon Snow document his work as a photojournalist and war correspondent in Africa, featuring research materials, notebooks, published writings by and about Snow, and a vast array of his photographs, slides, and negatives. The collection includes publications, documents, and book drafts Snow accumulated during the investigative process of writing his book, The Worst Interests of the Child. Also chronicled, his multi-year struggle with the town of Williamsburg, Massachusetts to enforce zoning bylaws that regulate the use of firearms and explosives at a shooting range near his property.

Originating in 1991, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) was established “to create a global network for book historians working in a broad range of scholarly disciplines.” With more than 1,000 members, research interests include the composition and reception of books as well as their survival and transformation over time.

Records cover the earliest days of the organization’s development, including founding documents, and document a variety of their activities from hosting conferences and publishing a newsletter to promoting scholarship.

Mark Sommer, with Zetta, the first newborn goat at the Sommer homestead in northern CA, May 1985

Mark Sommer is an explorer, storyteller, and award-winning public radio and print journalist focused on advocacy and narratives of social, political, and environmental change and positive action. In Washington, D.C., Sommer found himself on hand for some of the 1960s pivotal moments, where he was involved with the Liberation News Service and the New Left think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies. Sommer moved to California in 1969 to explore the counterculture, spending several years journeying – spiritually, psychedelically, and physically between communes, farms, and wilderness homesteads along the western coast – before he and his wife built a self-reliant organic homestead in the deep woods of northern CA, where they lived from the 1970s to the 1990s. The resilience of nature deeply impacted Sommer’s outlook and work as a writer and journalist, driving his interest in the human capacity for overcoming adversity. Sommer founded and directed the Mainstream Media Project, a nonprofit media placement service scheduling leading edge thinkers and social innovators for extensive radio interviews, and Sommer served as host and executive producer of the internationally syndicated and award winning, one-hour weekly radio program, A World of Possibilities. Sommer is the author of three books (Beyond the Bomb, The Conquest of War, and Living in Freedom), and hundreds of op-eds in major newspapers worldwide. Current projects include short and movie length videos crafted from his photographs, films, interviews, and experiences.

Chronicling over five decades of creative and journalistic output of a life-long explorer and progressive advocate, the Mark Sommer Papers are an extensive collection, covering Sommer’s entire career and personal life from the late 1960s to the present. Writings include personal and multiple travel journals (including a unique trip to North Vietnam in 1968), correspondence, student essays, op-eds, articles, project and grant plans, memoirs, and book manuscripts. Additional journals exist in audio format, along with radio interviews where Sommer served as a guest. Slides, photographs, and movies cover Sommer’s family and home life to his wide-ranging travels and interests. Some main topics of coverage include foreign policy and international politics, progressivism, peace and conflict studies, the anti-nuclear and disarmament movements, wilderness and back-to-the-land experiences, and later in life fatherhood. Materials from Mainstream Media Project have been separated into the Mainstream Media Project Records.

In 1589, Pedro Guillén de las Casas of Jaen, Andalusia, began the effort to petition the crown to have his claim to a noble lineage recognized. The carta executoria de hidalguia he sought was the written culmination of a legal process that began with assembling a “pruebas de hidalguia” containing evidence of a noble lineage and testimonies from town or regional officials. The request was submitted to one of two chancelleries that handled lawsuits of nobility, the Real Chancillería in Granada (for southern Spain) or Valladolid (for the north), and if approved, the carta executoria was issued acknowledging, rather than granting, nobility. De las Casas’s petition was approved in May 1590.

Issued in the name of King Philip II of Spain and Portugal at the time of his marriage to Mary I (1554-1558), this document is an exceptional example of the patents of nobility produced in Granada during the late sixteenth century. Bound in contemporary red velvet, it bestows the rank of hidalgo (gentleman) on Pedro Guillén de las Casas, and is illuminated with a series of exquisite miniatures, including one of Philip II, aged 33. The carta appears to be missing a frontispiece and text leaf, but includes a single paper leaf loosely inserted at the beginning with a nineteenth-century depiction of Christ carrying the Cross.

Pat Spaulding camera returning home, 1956 Sept.

In 1956, the graphic designer Pat Spaulding left for a tour of Europe. During her seven months abroad, she and her friend Maureen Jones traveled by motor scooter through France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany, staying in hostels and taking in the sights. Perhaps most memorably, Spaulding tore her Achilles tendon while visiting in Siena, Italy, receiving generous care from her hosts during the four-week period of her recovery.

A refreshing record of two young American women traveling alone in Europe during the mid-1950s, this scrapbook is populated with dozens of well laid-out photographs of sites seen, along with Spaulding’s letters home and a raft of ephemera such as picture postcards, copies of ticket stubs and passport pages, an international driver’s license, smallpox immunization certificate, maps, newsclippings, and beer coasters. Notably, the album also includes a number of beautiful, skillfully-rendered line drawings.

The photojournalist John Spragens spent the better part of a decade living in Southeast Asia from 1966-1974, working for a variety of relief and peace organizations.

Taken by John Spragens late in 1983, the black-and-white photographs in this collection document Cambodia shortly after the Vietnamese Army defeated Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge and installed a new order.

A renowned independent film maker and founder of Gabriel Films, Jonathan Stack has written and produced over two dozen documentary films and fifty television programs. Born in New York City in 1957, Stack graduated from UMass Amherst in 1979. From the time of his film Damned in the USA (1992), Stack has taken on challenging subjects, earning a reputation for gaining access into forbidden and often dangerous situations, from crack dens in Harlem to war-torn Liberia. The recipient of numerous honors in his career, Stack has been awarded five Emmy Awards, has twice been nominated for the Academy Award, and his film The Farm, on Angola Prison, won Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize in 1998.

The films and videos in the Stack collection include copies of his work in Liberia and Haiti and material from his documentary on prison rodeos at Angola Prison. The collection includes film from Damned in the USA (1992), Final Judgment (1996), and The Farm (1998), as well as footage from Harlem, Angola Prison, St. Gabriel Women’s Prison, and on body piercing, rodeo, and the prisoner Vincent Simmons.

A theater company of older adults based in Oakland, Calif., Stagebridge is recognized as a pioneer in the field of creative aging. Founded by Stuart Kandell in 1978, the organization sponsors workshops, performances, and other opportunities for lifelong learning that provide a creative means to transform the lives of older adults and their communities through the performing arts. Organized “for and of” older adults, Stagebridge is testimony to the ways in which elders enrich our culture and communities.

The Stagebridge collection contains scrapbooks, photograph albums, news clippings, and some scripts beginning in the earliest years of the organization. Digital materials in the collection are even richer, ranging from videos of performances to promotional materials and organizational records.

Since 1975, Community Development Coordinators for state-level arts agencies in the United States have met annually for the exchange of information, training, and to plan state and national programs for community activity in the arts. Charged with development of both community arts councils and rural arts, CDCs also work to decentralize efforts. In recent years, they have increasingly been engaged in arts and social action programs and in providing a voice on national arts policy.

This small collection documents over thirty years of annual meetings between Community Development Coordinators from state arts agencies across the United States. Organized chronologically, the collection includes agendas, membership lists, communications among organizers, and materials used in workshops and that document the history of CDCs. In 2000, the CDCs began keeping records electronically, though without designating a record keeper. Electronic records have not been included in the collection.