Collecting area: Social change

A noted figure in the alternative press and a former president of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, Clif Garboden was a long-time editor and writer for the Boston Phoenix. Arriving as a student at Boston University in 1966, Garboden was drawn into a close-knit, creative community on the BU News staff that included Raymond Mungo, Peter Simon, and Joe Pilati, filling a versatile role that entailed work as writer, editor, and photographer. After graduating in 1970, Garboden moved immediately to the Phoenix where he applied his signature wit and occasional snark to a wide range of topics. Apart from a six year period when he worked for the Boston Globe, Garboden was an indispensable part of the Phoenix editorial team until he was laid off in cost cutting moves in 2009. After a lengthy struggle with cancer, Garboden died of pneumonia on Feb. 10, 2011. He is survived by his wife, Susannah (Price), and children Molly and Phil.

The Garbdoen collection consists of hundreds of photographic prints, including work for both the Boston University News and the Phoenix and many personal images of family and friends.

Tom Gardner, 1966

Born in New Orleans in 1946, Tom Gardner began his involvement in social and political causes as a student at the University of Virginia (UVA) in 1964. He joined the burgeoning civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements and eventually dropped out of school to become a full time activist. During this time, he was the chairman of the Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC), an organization based in the south which opposed the Vietnam War, fought for civil rights for black Americans, and supported the rights of women and workers. He returned to UVA in 1969 and completed his bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1971.

Following UVA, Gardner worked as a staff member at the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) as an organizer. Concurrently, he joined the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF) and became a board member. SCEF was active in numerous causes in the south, dedicated in particular to civil rights and electoral reform.

Beginning in the 1970s, Gardner began work on prison issues, working with a number of politically and unfairly convicted prisoners, and advocating for an end to the death penalty. Gardner, and the groups he worked with, challenged the institutional racism of a southern justice system that had existed since the days of Jim Crow. The most prominent of these cases was that of Johnny ‘Imani’ Harris, who was originally sentenced to five life terms for 4 small robberies and an alleged rape in 1970 and eventually given the death penalty under Alabama’s capital offenses law due to an inadequate defense by his court appointed lawyers.

Concurrent to his work as an activist, Gardner has worked as a journalist and photographer, writing articles for a number of commercial publications as well as some independent work. While working for the Montgomery Advertiser, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, and others, he covered local, college, and political news. Gardner has also used journalism to bolster his activism, writing for left-wing publications such as Workers World and The Great Speckled Bird. He used his talents in photography by taking photos of protests and events he attended for use in articles by him and others.

Gardner returned to school several times after originally graduating from UVA in 1971. He received a masters degree in Journalism from the University of Georgia in 1982, a masters in Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard in 1985, and later a Ph.D. in Communication from UMASS Amherst in 2005. Throughout his PhD program and since its completion, Gardner has been a professor of Communication at Westfield State University, using his experience from a life full of activism to continue educating a new generation of students and activists.

This Gardner collection illustrates much of Gardner’s activism and journalism work throughout his life. It contains correspondence, articles, press releases, meeting minutes, photographs, pamphlets, newsletters, publications, notes, and newspapers. The collection documents the full scope of Gardner’s life; from his time as a student activist at the University of Virginia to his more recent achievements as a professor at Westfield State University.

The collection also contains a large amount of material written by Gardner himself, as well as publications, newspapers, and articles that either relate to causes he was directly involved in or the political issues of the day.

Alice Blake Hawes Garside, who became a prominent educator in Boston known for working with students with reading and learning challenges, was born in 1909 in New Bedford, Mass., a descendant of a whaling family with deep roots there. She graduated from Vassar College in 1930, the year she married Kenneth Garside, with whom she had three daughters before they divorced in 1956. Beginning in the early 1950s, Alice Garside worked as a reading tutor at the Cambridge School in Weston and reading supervisor in the language clinic at Mass General, where she was trained in the Orton-Gillingham method under Dr. Edwin Cole, a pioneer in the field of learning disabilities. Having also earned a master’s degree from Boston University, she trained teachers at the Carroll School from its founding in 1967, joining the school’s staff in 1976 and staying until her retirement in 1990. She was honored as the first recipient of the Alice H. Garside Award from the Massachusetts Branch of the International Dyslexia Association in 1985 and the IDA’s highest honor, the Samuel T. Orton Award, in 1987. In her retirement, she continued to consult on reading and made regular trips to the Bermuda Reading Clinic. Alice Garside passed away in 2007 at age 98.

The Alice H. Garside Papers cover Garside’s professional life as a teacher as well as her personal life. There is documentation of her extensive travels, including the six-month round-the-world trip she took not long after her divorce, as well as correspondence, photographs and photo albums, journals, ephemera, and memorabilia. The collection also includes some family history and genealogical material.

Access restrictions: Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA in advance to request materials from this collection.

In the early 1970s, the documentary filmmaker Bruce Geisler dropped out of Pomona College one semester short of graduation, drove across country, and joined the Brotherhood of the Spirit commune, then the largest commune in the eastern United States. During his four years living with the Brotherhood, later renamed the Renaissance Community, Geisler learned the craft of filmmaking, before returning west to earn an MFA at the film school of the University of Southern California. Geisler has received a number of awards as a screenwriter and filmmaker including the Grand Prize for Best Screenplay from Worldfest Houston and the Dominique Dunne Memorial Prize for Filmmaking, and, in 2007, he released his feature-length documentary, Free Spirits, about the Brotherhood of the Spirit/Renaissance Community and its ill-fated founder, Michael Metelica Rapunzel. Geisler is currently a Senior Lecturer in the UMass Amherst Department of Communication.

Documenting everyday life in a Massachusetts commune and performances by the commune bands (Spirit in Flesh and Rapunzel), the Geisler collection was assembled in conjunction with the making of the film Free Spirits. In addition to many hours of both raw and edited film footage taken by members of the Brotherhood of the Brotherhood of the Spirit and Renaissance Community, the collection includes a rich assemblage of still photographs, ephemera, and newspaper clippings relating to the commune.

Ledger, begun by George Cooley in 1843 to record the accounts of his soapmaking business in the Cabotville section of Chicopee, continued by Titus Chapin, an ardent abolitionist, and Mordecai Cough who managed the business following Cooley’s death (or departure) in 1848. The 1843 date coincides with the coming of many small businesses to Cabotville in connection with the growth of industries there at the time.

Cooley accepted goods, services and cash as payment. The most frequently accepted goods had relatively obvious value to a soap maker: grease and ashes, tallow, pork, scraps and skins, and candles. Some of the services bartered were repairing wagon, shoeing horse, fixing wippletree, making 30 boxes, and covering umbrella. The business sold gallons, bars, and cakes of soap. Mount Holyoke Seminary bought 28 “fancy soaps”. Also listed were shaving soap and hard or hand soap. In addition, sales sometimes included candles, butter, mop handles, molasses, apples and potatoes, squashes, satinet, cheese, cord wood, paint, and rosin. Some of the listings were annotated with regard to the customer’s character: Ashad Bartlett was seen as “bad and poor and fights with his wife”‘ Norris Starkwether was “an honest man”; and Miss L.B. Hunt “eloped with a man”.

An organizer, consultant, and educator in the alternative agriculture movement, Grace Gershuny has been active in the field since the 1970s when she worked for the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA), developing its first organic certification program. As a leader in the movement, Gershuny helped to establish both the Organic Trade Association and the Organic Farmer: The Digest of Sustainable Agriculture. Today she continues to write and teach on the subject, serving as a faculty member at a number of colleges, most recently Green Mountain College.

The collection consists chiefly of printed material from a run of the Organic Farmer to Appropriate Technology Transfer for Rural Areas (ATTRA) publications and organizational newsletters, such as the Rural Education Center. Amongst these publications are a few small but significant groups of materials including notes from Gershuny’s role as the NOFA VT coordinator in 1979 and her drafts and notes for the second editions of The Soul of Soil.

A native New Yorker born in 1959, Al Giordano was drawn into the antinuclear movement as a teenager, becoming an important organizer for the antinuclear and environmental movements. Giordano sharpened his organizing skills through a close association with Abbie Hoffman, with whom he often collaborated throughout the 1980s. Giordano has worked as a journalist for several decades, primarily with the alternative press, founding his own periodical Narco News in 2000 and the School of Authentic Journalism in 2002. He currently resides in Mexico City.

The Giordano collection contains a miscellaneous assemblage of ephemera, publications and newspapers, reports, and a small quantity of correspondence, relating to antinuclear activism.

Barbara Gittings and her life partner Kay Tobin Lahusen were pioneers in the gay rights movement. After coming out during her freshman year at Northwestern University, Gittings became keenly aware of the difficulty of finding material to help her understand her gay identity. An inveterate organizer, she helped found the New York chapter of the early Lesbian organization, the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) in 1957, and she became well known in the 1960s for organizing the first gay rights demonstrations at the White House and Independence Hall. Gittings later worked with organizations from the American Library Association to the American Psychiatric Association to address systematic forms of anti-gay discrimination.
The Gittings-Lahusen Gay Book Collection contains nearly 1,000 books on the gay experience in America collected by Gittings and Lahusen throughout their career. The contents range from a long run of The Ladder, the DOB magazine co-edited by the couple, to works on the psychology and sociology of homosexuality, works on religious and political issues, novels and histories by gay authors, and examples of the pulp fiction of the 1950s and 1960s.

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David Glassberg, ca. 2016

David Glassberg (1954-) taught United States cultural, public, and environmental history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst between 1986 and 2024. A native of Philadelphia, he earned a BA from the University of Chicago (1976) and PhD from The Johns Hopkins University (1982). His research examines the interrelationship of historical consciousness and environmental perception in the US as represented in politics, culture, and the landscape. Among his publications are American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (1990); Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life (2001); “What’s ‘American’ about American Lieux de Mémoire?” (2008); (with Robert Paynter) “Du Bois in Great Barrington: The Promises and Pitfalls of a Boyhood Historic Site” (2012); “Place, Memory, and Climate Change” (2014); “The Changing Cape: Using History to Engage Coastal Residents in Community Conversations About Climate Change” (2017); “Practicing Heritage Justice: Helping Your Community Decide Which Historic Places To Protect From The Impact Of Climate Change (and Which to Let Go)” (2022); and “Laurance S. Rockefeller and the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission: Race, Recreation, and National Parks” (2022). Glassberg has also collaborated with a number of museums and national parks, including the W.E.B. Du Bois National Historical Landmark, the Statue of Liberty National Monument, Minnesota Historical Society, Boston Children’s Museum, Pinelands (N.J.) National Reserve, Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park, Springfield Armory National Historical Site, and the Cape Cod National Seashore.

Box 1. Glassberg before UMASS
Box 2. Glassberg California History Notes
Box 3. Consulting and Conference notes, other papers and writing (1996-2024)
Box 4. NPS and Landscape Conservation notes
Box 5. Glassberg’s Public History Program materials and local history
Box 6. New Jersey Pinelands research
Box 7. Pageantry Notes and photocopies
Box 8. Pageantry Notes and photocopies
Box 9. Pageantry Notecards
Box 10. Slides, town character notes
Box 11. Research notes for Sense of History
Box 12. Annual Reports and Publications
Box 13. Consulting, conferences, and other writing (1986-1995)

An environmental chemist, Ted Goldfarb was a founder of the Science for the People chapter at SUNY Stony Brook and an organizer of the group’s second trip to the People’s Republic of China in June 1978. The twelve delegates from SftP went with the intention of studying the organization of science and technology in China with respect to how it met people’s needs, and they were toured through a succession of factories, production facilities, farms, schools, and institutes in Guangzhou, Shanghai, Changsha, and Beijing, among other locations.

The nearly 400 slides in this collection were taken by Ted Goldfarb (and handful by his colleague Judith Weinstein) when they were members of the second Science for the People delegation to the People’s Republic of China in June 1978. Reflecting their interests in science and technology, the slides document a succession of factories, production facilities, schools, and institutes they visited, but include shots of typical street scenes, markets, artisans and factory workers, and tourist sites such as the Great Wall, Ming Tombs, and Forbidden City. In addition to the images of China, a handful were taken during a stopover in Delhi and Agra, India, on the way back to the United States.