Collecting area: Printed materials

1977 Spring Equinox cover of WomenSpirit

All social change and cultural movements have their associated resources for the exchange of information, ideas, stories, and art. Particularly in the women’s movement, the effort to create newsletters, journals, and other forms of information dissemination was a proactive step taken to assert women’s stories and to locate the power of the press within women-run communities. These periodicals, both large and small in scale, reveal the ways women connected to each other and to larger spiritual and cultural concepts. Local artist, activist, and feminist Jay Goldspinner was engaged with many of these communities, particularly those characterizing the spiritual elements of the women’s liberation and feminist movements, and collected and saved their periodicals. Her collection includes journals focusing on feminist linguistics, goddess myths and spirituality, Wiccan and witch traditions, progressive politics, and women’s spirituality and community in local and international settings. Each is a unique window into discourses of women’s history, feminist movements, and social change work.

The Jay Goldspinner Collection consists of issues of feminist and progressive periodicals, journals, and newsletters from over five decades, along with correspondence, ephemera, and scrapbooks from Goldspinner’s life, especially her work as a storyteller. Published titles represented include Always in Season, Goddessing, The Lonesome Node, The People’s Voice of Franklin County, Themis/Thesmophoria, Wicked Word, and an almost complete run, including the two indexes, of the seminal magazine of feminist spirituality, WomenSpirit.

Jean Bergantini Grillo was the Cambridge and Boston Phoenix’s Senior Editor from its first issue in 1969 through 1972. When the original staff of the Phoenix was let go after the paper’s sale in the summer of 1972, Grillo helped start The Real Paper with the rest of the fired staff. While at the Phoenix, Grillo was an art critic and covered feminist issues and activism. She graduated from Rhode Island College in 1966 with a degree in English and after working at the Phoenix, continued an active career as a journalist, art critic, television writer and playwright.

The Jean Bargantini Grillo Collection contains a complete run of the Phoenix from its first issue as the Cambridge Phoenix in 1969 until the original staff moved to the Real Paper in 1972. There are also several early issues of The Real Paper until Grillo left the paper in late 1972. There is also a small group of reporter’s notebooks used by Grillo in 1971 and 1972, index cards from her rolodex, and a proof for a political cartoon created for the Phoenix by William D. Steele.

A theoretical physicist at University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, Paul Halpern is the author of a dozen popular books on science and dozens of scholarly articles. After spending his undergraduate years at Temple University, Halpern received a doctorate at SUNY Stony Brook, and has since written on complex and higher-dimensional solutions in general relativity theory and the nature of time as well as the history of the modern physical sciences. He has been a Fulbright Scholar and fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

The hundreds of ephemeral publications, fliers, and handbills in the Halpern Collection provide a window into political and social activism in Philadelphia during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The content ranges widely from publications produced by peace and disarmament groups to the literature of anti-imperialist (e.g. CISPES), antinuclear groups (SANE and post-Three Mile Island mobilization), radical political parties, and religious organizations including the Unification Church and the Church of Scientology.

Daughter of a writer and diplomat, and graduate of Wellesley College, Beth Hapgood has been a spiritual seeker for much of her life. Her interests have led her to become an expert in graphology, a student in the Arcane School, an instructor at Greenfield Community College, and a lecturer on a variety of topics in spiritual growth. Beginning in the mid-1960s, Hapgood befriended Michael Metelica, the central figure in the Brotherhood of the Spirit (the largest commune in the eastern states during the early 1970s) as well as Elwood Babbitt, a trance medium, and remained close to both until their deaths.
The Hapgood Papers contain a wealth of material relating to the Brotherhood of the Spirit and the Renaissance Community, Metelica, Babbitt, and other of Hapgood’s varied interests, as well as 4.25 linear feet of material relating to the Hapgood family.

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Robert A. Irwin is an activist and educator living in Massachusetts. He first became active in social change work with Movement for a New Society (1971-1988), and went on to work with such organizations as the Exploratory Project on the Conditions of Peace (ExPro), and New England War Tax Resistance, and with organizers and activists such as Gene Sharp, Randy Kehler, Elise Boulding, Randy Forsberg, Robert Jay Lifton, and George Lakey. He was an active collector of published materials from these movements. Irwin studied philosophy at Princeton University and Antioch College, and earned a Ph.D. in sociology at Brandeis University. He has taught at Tufts University, Brandeis, College of the Holy Cross, and, for over twenty years, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Writing and Communication Center. In addition to his activism and collecting, Irwin has authored resources on coalition building, nonviolence, and peace, including his book Building a Peace System (1989); a book chapter condensing his book in Mobilizing Democracy (1991), and with Gordon Faison “Why Nonviolence?,” a special Dandelion Issue issued by Movement for a New Society.

The Robert A. Irwin Periodicals Collection consists of publications and periodicals produced by activists and movements for social justice. The collection’s topic area is broad, but it has especially strong representation from movements engaged in peace work, nonviolence, politics, radicalism, socialism, and feminism. Titles with larger runs include WIN (subtitled “Peace and Freedom through Nonviolent Action,”) Liberation, Monthly Review, Our Generation, Peace Work, Radical America, Seven Days, Socialist Revolution, and Telos, among others. The collection also includes Irwin’s own book and other publications.

Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA to request materials from this collection.

As a university student in Warsaw, Poland, in January 1977, Barbara Jakubowska-Schlatner made the decision to join the democratic resistance to the Communist regime. For more than twelve years, she was an active member of the Solidarity (Solidarnosc) movement, organizing opposition to state oppression, producing and distributing underground literature, and working with the pirate broadcasts of Solidarity radio.

Recognizing the importance of the underground press to the Solidarity movement, Jakubowska-Schlatner went to extraordinary lengths to collect and preserve their publications. At various times, the collection was kept in the basement of her mother’s house, spread around among a series of safe locations, and sometimes even secreted in small caches in back lots. The collection of over 1,500 titles is centered on the underground press in Warsaw, but includes titles published in Wroclaw, Gdansk, Krakow, and other cities. These include a startling array of publications, from fliers, handbills, and ephemera to translations of foreign literature, newspapers and periodicals, a science fiction magazine, and instructions on how to run a small press.

For seven years after the end of World War II, the United States led an occupation force in Japan that oversaw comprehensive reforms of the country’s military, economy, politics, and social order. Under the direction of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Command of Allied Powers (SCAP) dismantled and disarmed the military, conducted a series of war crimes trials, and undertook significant reforms in land tenure, industry, and the economy, culminating in the imposition of new pacifist constitution that shifted power from the Emperor to parliament. In the face of the rise of the Cold War and change in international priorities, the U.S. brokered a final peace settlement with Japan that formally ended the occupation in 1952, leaving American bases and bilateral security pact intact.

Focused on the period 1945-1952, this collection includes a sampling of printed materials aimed at average American servicemen and their dependents involved in the occupation and reconstruction of Japan. The collection includes histories and guidebooks, picture books aimed at tourists, and a few examples of instructional materials and propaganda.

The heart of the Kress Collection lies in the lively pamphlet literature regarding Anglo-American political economics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although somewhat miscellaneous, the collection contains thousands of titles touching on many of the major issues in trade, finance, political reform, and public policy in Britain and to a lesser degree America. Topics range from tariffs and free trade to public debt and taxation, imports and exports, banking, unionism, and socialism. Nearly three quarters of the collection dates from before 1848.

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The Jug Band visionary Jim Kweskin was one of the major lights of the 1960s folk revival, and an influential figure in Americana music since. A native New Englander, Kweskin was born in Stamford, Conn., in 1940. As a student at Boston University, he was drawn into the Boston-Cambridge folk scene and inspired to learn the guitar, developing a ragtime-blues fingerpicking technique that he inflected with jazz and blues that became a bedrock style of the folk revival. Following a sojourn in California, he returned to Boston in 1963 and formed the Jug Band with Fritz Richmond, Geoff Muldaur, Bob Siggins, and Bruno Wolfe, later joined by Maria Muldaur, Mel Lyman, Bill Keith, and Richard Greene. The Jug Band developed a national following performing pre-World War II American music, laced with a sense of humor and 1960s sensibility. At the height of their popularity, the Jug Band dissolved in 1968. For several years in the 1980s and 1990s, Kweskin was relatively removed from recording, but he resumed work as a soloist, as a member of the U & I Band, the Texas Sheiks, the Jug Band; and as fellow performer with a long list of artists.

A rich record of eclectic musical tastes and a passion for American music, the Kweskin collection offers important documentation of a major figure on the folk scene. The collection includes scrapbooks, newsclippings, concert posters and fliers, and ephemera from throughout Kweskin’s career, along with hundreds of personal and professional photographs of Kweskin, the Jug Band, U and I, and later collaborations. As an historian of American music, Kweskin also assembled discographies of major artists and labels and built a library of works on blues, country, and other forms of popular music, along with hundreds of 78 rpm records, 45s, LPs, and compact disc recordings. Finally, there are hundreds of reel to reel, cassette, CD, and DVD recordings of Kweskin from throughout his career.

Fred Lerner is a librarian, bibliographer, and historian who has written extensively on American science fiction. After earning three degrees from Columbia University, including his MLS and DLS (1981), Lerner worked for many years in information science for Spectra, Inc., and the National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. His diverse including work in radio, writing about the history of psychiatry, libraries, Rudyard Kipling, and science fiction.

The Lerner collection contains a cross-section of American science fiction writing concentrated largely in the 1960s through mid-1980s.