Collecting area: New England

Quaker worship began at Swansea, Mass., by 1701, under the care of Rhode Island Monthly Meeting, with the Swansea Monthly Meeting being set off in 1732. Situated in an area with a relatively large Quaker population, Swansea oversaw worship groups and preparative meetings in nearby Fall River, Freetown, Somerset, Taunton, and Troy. Swansea was divided by the separation of 1845, with the Wilburite meeting persisting for about twenty years.

The records of Swansea Monthly Meeting are a rich assemblage of meeting minutes, vital records, and other materials, covering nearly two and a half centuries of Quaker activity on Cape Cod. The collection also includes records of the Fall River and Swansea Preparative Meetings.

The Separation of 1845 that affected the New England Yearly Meeting of Friends was profoundly felt throughout Rhode Island and Cape Cod. The meeting at Swansea, Mass., split in 1844, with the Wilburite Monthly of that name becoming part of the Rhode Island Quarterly Meeting. In 1863, Swansea Monthly was laid down, with the Fall River Preparative Meeting transferring to Providence Monthly Meeting (Wilburite). A small number of Friends in Swansea rejected the decision to lay down the meeting and continued to meet as an independent body until 1865.

The short history of the Wilburite Swansea Monthly Meeting in four slender volumes of meeting minutes (one from the women’s meeting) and a thin records of marriages.

Born in Sacramento, Calif., but raised in Colorado, the biological anthropologist Alan C. Swedlund received each of his degrees at the University of Colorado Boulder (PhD, 1970). After a brief stint at Prescott College, Swedlund joined the faculty at UMass Amherst in 1973, where he helped to develop the doctoral program in biological anthropology and chaired the department for five years in the early 1990s. A prolific scholar, he drew upon diverse methodologies drawn from demography, epidemiology, and physical anthropology to explore interactions between cultural processes and human biological conditions in populations ranging from the Ancient Pueblo of the southwestern United States, to contemporary Central America and Yucatan, and historical New England. Among dozens of publications, he was author or editor of seven books, including Shadows in the Valley: A Cultural History of Illness, Death, and Loss in New England, 1840-1916 (2010), Plagues and Epidemics: Infected Spaces Past and Present (2010), and Beyond Germs: Explorations of Indigenous Depopulation in North America (2015). He was granted emeritus status upon his retirement in 2008.

The Swedlund Papers include extensive professional correspondence from his first professional appointment at Prescott College through the time of his retirement, along with numerous grant applications, unpublished papers and talks, and research data. Of particular note are extensive records and data files for his study of nineteenth-century demography in the Connecticut River Valley and Franklin County, Mass.

Just 36 years of age, Jane Swift became Acting Governor of Massachusetts in 2001, the first and only woman to hold that office, the youngest woman governor in US history, and the only one to give birth while in office. A native of North Adams, Swift served as a Republican in the state Senate from 1990-1996, becoming widely known for her role in passing the Education Reform Act of 1993. Defeated in a bid to represent the 1st District in the US Congress, she served in the William Weld administration before earning election as Lieutenant Governor in 1998, rising to the governorship three years later when Paul Cellucci resigned to become Ambassador to Canada. During her time in office, Swift, but her tenure is remembered both for her calm management of the fallout from the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and for a series of controversies that ultimatley cost her political support. Trailing eventual nominee Mitt Romney in the 2002 Republican gubentorial primary, Swift abandoned her campaign. Returning home to Williamstown, where she has been involved in several educational initiatives, including serving as Director of Sally Ride Science, a lecturer in Leadership Studies at Williams Colege, and since July 2011, CEO of Middlebury Interactive Languages. She remains active in Republican politics.

Centered on her political career, Jane Swift’s Papers provide insight into her experiences as governor of Massachusetts with content ranging from policy briefings to topical files, technical reports, economic and budgetary information, correspondence, legal filings, and transition reports at the time of leaving office. The visual documentation of Swift’s time in office includes a wide range of photographs, videotapes, paraphernalia, and souvenirs. There is comparatively little material is available to document Swift’s time in the state senate.

The Tax Equity Alliance for Massachusetts (TEAM) was formed in 1987 as a coalition of tax reformers made up government groups, civic and business leaders, human services advocates, unions, and others who shared the conviction that fair taxation and quality services must go hand-in-hand and who opposed extreme tax reduction for the dire impact it would have on state budgets and support for state programs.

This small collection contains a copy of “Talking Tax,” a publication of the Tax Equity Alliance for Massachusetts, along with brochures for their volunteers and for the public.

The wheelwright Levi Ely Taylor was born in Longmeadow, Mass., on Nov. 17, 1795, the son of Nathaniel and Jerusha Taylor. Marrying a woman from Rocky Hill, Conn., Laura Peirce, he settled in Longmeadow and built a prosperous life for himself in his trade. His eldest son, Newton, followed him into the business.

Taylor’s daybook contains careful records of a wheelwright from Longmeadow, Mass., documenting his varied work in the repair of carriages. The transactions that appear in the volume range from making whiffletrees to shortening wheels, making and fitting out carriage seats, and painting and varnishing vehicles, with occasional forays into selling goods such as wheelbarrows and straw cutters.

Long-time residents of Berkeley, California, Thomas W. Tenney and his wife Margaret took up photography in a serious way in the early 1960s. Photographing the Bay Area scene and publishing in the New York Times and elsewhere, Thomas Tenney became a full-time photographer by about 1960. His photographic interests ranged from urban landscapes and advertising signs to the popular culture of the 1960s and 1970s. Margaret Tenney, also a photographer, was a visual artist who worked in collage and monoprint. For over a decade, the couple took summer trips to New England to photograph colonial and early national gravestones, culminating in a public exhibition of their work in 1972 at the Bolles Gallery in San Francisco.

A vast array of the Tenneys’ photography, artwork, and collection of historic photographs, including thousands of photographs and negatives ranging from the mid-19th century to the early 2000s.

A popular Spanish-language community radio program broadcast on the New England Public Radio station WFCR, Tertulia featured a wide range of music from the Caribbean region and South and Central America, news in both English and Spanish, and discussions of topics of importance to the Latino community. As of 2017, the show has enjoyed over thirty years on air.

The Tertulia collection consists of hundreds of cassette recordings of the radio show, mostly taken as air-checks and many of interviews with members of the Latino community in Western New England.

Four local unions located in New Bedford, Massachusetts, that joined in 1939 and became the first affiliates of the New Bedford Joint Board of the Textile Workers Union of America. Includes by-laws, minutes of board of directors and local meetings, correspondence, subject files, photographs, and scrapbooks relating to the administration of the New Bedford Joint Board, documenting its role in addressing grievances filed against individual companies, in facilitating arbitration, and hearing wage stabilization Board cases.

A graduate of Yale, failed schoolmaster, and politically-connected customs collector in eastern Maine during the antebellum period, Stephen Thacher raised a large family with grand intellectual ambitions. Thacher’s sons made the most of their collegiate educations in their careers in law and the ministry, his eldest daughter Mary married Thomas Wentworth Higginson, while a granddaughter Alice Thacher married the Harvard historian Edward Channing, son of William Ellery Channing and nephew of Margaret Fuller.

These relics of a prominent New England family contain nearly 150 letters, dozens of photographs and other visual materials, and a large assortment of books from three generations of Thachers and Channings. The letters are a rich resource for understanding the life of Stephen Thacher from the uncertainty of youth in Connecticut to political and financial success in the ports of eastern Maine. Assembled by Stephen’s son Peter, the collection includes a number of noteworthy items, including an excellent letter from Timothy Goodwin in July 1775, describing his experiences during the failed expedition on Quebec and the retreat to Crown Point, and a series of letters from Congressman Martin Kinsley on the major issues of the day, including the extension of slavery to the territories and formation of the state of Maine.