Collecting area: Photographs

A long-time member of the English Department at the University of Albany, Barbara Rotundo was a 1942 graduate in economics at Mount Holyoke College. After the death of her husband, Joseph in 1953, Rotundo became one of the first female faculty members at Union College, and after earning a master’s degree in English at Cornell University and a doctorate in American Literature from Syracuse University, she served as an associate professor of English at the University of Albany, where she founded one of the first university writing programs in the United States. Avocationally, she was a stalwart member of the Association for Gravestone Studies, helping to broaden its scope beyond its the Colonial period to include the Victorian era. Her research included the rural cemetery movement, Mount Auburn Cemetery, white bronze (zinc) markers, and ethnic folk gravestones. Her research in these fields was presented on dozens of occasions to annual meetings of AGS, the American Culture Association, and The Pioneer America Society. In 1989, after residing in Schenectady for forty-six years, she retired to Belmont, NH, where she died in December 2004.

Consisting primarily of thousands of color slides (most digitized) and related research notebooks, the Rotundo collection is a major visual record of Victorian grave markers in the United States. The notebooks and slides are arranged by state, with an emphasis on the eastern states, and white bronze (zinc) markers also are represented in photographs and a separate research notebook. The collection also includes several rare or privately published books.

Emanuel Rubin was a professor of Musicology and Judaic Studies at UMass Amherst from 1986 until his death in 2008. From 1986-1987 he served as Head of the Department of Music and Dance. In addition to teaching, he performed frequently as a soloist and an ensemble member on the French horn, Viola da Gamba, and as a choral member. He actively conducted and composed works for solo performers and ensembles. Rubin was originally from Pittsburgh, and attended Carnegie Mellon University for his undergraduate work. He received a Master’s Degree in Music composition from Brandeis University, and a doctorate in musicology from University of Pittsburgh. Prior to arriving at UMass Amherst, he taught at Ball State University, University of Milwaukee Wisconsin, and Bowling Green State University. His research interests were the relationship between Judaism and music, and the history of glees, which was the topic of his doctoral dissertation.

The Emanuel Rubin Papers contain records of extensive research in the area of Georgian glees, including historical background, scores, lyrics, and correspondence regarding the research. The collection also includes programs and newspaper clippings from many of Rubin’s performances throughout his career, manuscripts of his publications and compositions, as well as some teaching materials and course information from his time at UMass.

In the summer 1962, future Harvard student Steve Saltonstall became one of the early wave of white northerners who went into the Jim Crow south to work for civil rights. During that summer, he worked with SNCC to organize public accommodations in Cairo, Ill., and with an AFSC crew to help clear brush from a drainage ditch near Circle City, Missouri, encountering local resistance in both places. Saltonstall later became an attorney and currently practices in Vermont.

The Saltonstall collection consists of approximately sixty photographs taken by John Engel during his tour with an AFSC crew during the summer of 1962. While most of the images depict the crew’s work near Circle City, Missouri, six photos document a civil rights rally in Cairo, Ill. The images are available in digital form only.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Albert Sawin and his wife Elizabeth (nee Young) lived on Taylor Street in Holyoke, Massachusetts, with their three children, Allan, Ralph, and Alice. Elizabeth’s brother, also named Allan, traveled in the west during the 1880s, looking for work in Arizona, Utah, and Montana.

The bulk of the Sawin-Young Family Papers consists of letters exchanged between Elizabeth “Lizzie” Sawin, her sisters, and Jennie Young of nearby Easthampton. Later letters were addressed to Beatrice Sawin at Wheaton College from her father Walter E. Sawin, who contributed to the design for the Holyoke dam. The photograph album (1901) kept by Alice E. Sawin features images of the interior and exterior of the family’s home, as well as candid shots of family and friends and photographs of excursions to nearby Mt. Tom and the grounds of Northfield School.

One of the most frequently published photographers in Life magazine during the late 1960s, Rowland Scherman is noted for an iconic portfolio that documents the worlds of politics, culture, and the rock music scene. Born in New York in 1937, Scherman attended Oberlin College and began his career in the darkroom at Life before winning an assignment as the first official photographer for the Peace Corps in 1961. His work blossomed after becoming a free-lancer two years later, with assignments that included the civil rights March on Washington and the presidential campaign of Lyndon Baines Johnson. He covered the Newport Folk Festival when Bob Dylan broke on the national scene, the Beatles’ first concert in the U.S., Robert Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency, and Woodstock, and he went along on a memorable tour with Judy Collins. His work has appeared in dozens of magazines and books, including Life, Look, Time, National Geographic, Playboy, and Paris Match, earning wide acclaim, including a Grammy Award in 1968 for the portrait that appears on the cover of Dylan’s greatest hits album. Scherman relocated to London in 1970, then to Birmingham, Ala., in the 1980s, and finally to Cape Cod on 2000. He continues to shoot portraits, photo essays, and abstract work.

This rich collection consists of nearly the entire body of work from Rowland Scherman’s long career in photography, including negatives and transparencies with a small selection of prints. Negatives from the March on Washington and the Peace Corps are in the collections of the Library of Congress.

A life-long resident of Lake Pleasant, Massachusetts, and a third-generation Spiritualist, Louise Shattuck was an artist, teacher, and noted breeder of English cocker spaniels.

Shattuck’s work as a teacher, writer, artist, and dog breeder are documented in this collection through decades of correspondence and diaries, artwork, publications, and newspaper clippings. Of particular note are the materials associated with the Spiritualist history of Lake Pleasant, including three turn of the century spirit slates, samples of Louise’s automatic writing, a ouija board and dowsing rods, and an excellent photograph album with associated realia for the Independent Order of Scalpers, a Lake Pleasant.

From a childhood spent in a tenement in Norfolk, Va., Carolyn Martin Shaw went on to enjoy a distinguished career as a pioneer in Black Feminist anthropology. Educated in segregated schools, she was an outstanding student, winning scholarship funding to Michigan State University, where she received both her BS (1966) and PhD (1975). Shaw’s dissertation on Kikuyu kinship morality marked several themes that she developed through subsequent research projects in Kenya and Zimbabwe. Based in the Department of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz throughout her career, she was a productive scholar, publishing dozens of articles and chapters, and two important monographs, Colonial Inscriptions: Race, Class and Sex in Kenya (1995) and Women and Power in Zimbabwe: Promises of Feminism (2015), and she filled a variety of administrative posts, including department chair, Provost of the Kresge residential college, and Chair of the UC system-wide Committee on Privilege and Tenure. She has received numerous awards in her career, including a Fulbright Fellowship to the University of Zimbabwe in 1983-1984, a Danforth Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, and a McHenry Award for Service to the Academic Senate at UCSC. Shaw retired from UCSC in 2010.

Documenting her work in Black feminist anthropology, the Carolyn Martin Shaw collection includes published and unpublished writing, correspondence, and a wealth of information on her research in Kenya and Zimbabwe. Along with her fieldnotes, research data, and photographs, the collection also includes records of her faculty service at USCS, and awards received for teaching and university service.

Born on New Year’s Day 1876 to Mark and Katie Shultis, Newton Shultis became a member of the Massachusetts Agricultural College Class of 1896. A resident of Medford, Mass., at the start of his college career, Shultis was described by his classmates in the yearbook as “the only man in the class who has not an enemy in college.” An avid fan of the baseball and football teams, the former of which he was manger, Shultis was also a member of the Washington Irving Literary Society, DGK fraternity, and the YMCA, and he was known to have brought a Hawkeye camera with him to campus. After graduation, Shultis joined his father in the family grain shipping business in Boston where for many years he was a member of the Chamber of Commerce. Shultis died in Hopkinton, N.H. in 1956.

The Shultis papers include a selection of correspondence from Shultis to his parents during his college years, along with a remarkable array of ephemera, including his cadet’s uniform with hat, belt, and bayonet scabbard; his graduation robes; a three-volume herbarium; three volumes of class notes and essays; 16 dry plate glass negatives; a Class of 1896 photograph album; and miscellaneous photographs, school books, and ephemera.

Specializing in study of the biology and evolutionary history of ciliophorans, Eugene B. Small conducted both laboratory and field studies in comparative morphology and morphogenesis, ciliate ecology, phylogeny, life history, and nutrition. He was particularly noted for his work on ciliophorans from marine habitats ranging from the psammitic shores to the pelagic zones to deep sea hydrothermal vents. After receiving his doctorate at UCLA in 1964, Small served on the Zoology faculty at the University of Illinois and, from 1972, in the Department of Biology at the University of Maryland.

The collection consists primarily of thousands of electron micrographs of ciliophorans taken over the course of Small’s career, along with a small number of laboratory and field notebooks.

An activist with an international reputation, Agnes Smedley is most often associated with women’s rights, birth control, Indian independence, and China’s Communist revolution.

These black and white mounted prints, many taken by Agnes Smedley with her captions and accompanying narratives, were reproduced from the Smedley Collection at Arizona State University. Most are of China, but the collection also include scenes of the American West and students at the Tempe Normal School. The images were assembled for exhibition, most likely by the Women’s Studies Program at UMass Amherst.