Local chapter of the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers that represented workers at the Chapman Valve Manufacturing Company of Indian Orchard, Massachusetts. Records include detailed minute books of general and executive board meetings as well as several ledgers that reflect the activities of the credit union and the Chapman Valve Athletic Association.
After 1975 was designated as the first International Women’s Year by the United Nations, later extended to a decade, President Carter created a National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year. A national women’s conference was proposed and funded by the U.S.Congress, the first and only time the federal government funded a nationwide women’s conference. A series of state meetings were held throughout 1977 to elect delegates to the national conference and to identify goals for improving the status of women over the next decade.
This collection consists of state reports prepared and submitted to the National Commission for the Observance of International Women’s Year. Reports include details about the election of national delegates, topics of workshops held at the meetings, and resolutions adopted by individual states.
The Irma McClaurin Black Feminist Archive (BFA) is an archival home for Black women and their allies. Founded by Dr. Irma McClaurin, Black feminist anthropologist, academic administrator, award-winning poet and author, past president of Shaw University and leader in higher education, the BFA seeks to identify Black women from all walks of life who are artists, activists, and academics but may not be well known, and document their wide array of contributions at many levels: community, state, national, and global. In addition to being an ongoing resource for academic and community researchers, the BFA also aims to be a training center, where Black archivists can actively participate in their own history and uplift and protect the endangered legacy of Black women. Articles about Dr. McClaurin and the BFA have appeared in the Massachusetts Daily Collegian, UMass Magazine and on the the Black Presence website. Her article, “Black Women, Visible and Heard,” published in UMass Magazine was highlighted when the publication received the Gold level CASE award in 2022.
The BFA is an umbrella collection, made up of a growing and diverse group of collections documenting Black women, allies, movements, and organizations. Highlights include the papers of renown anthropologists Sheila Walker and Carolyn Martin Shaw; Belizean writer Zee Edgell; activist and educator Cheryl Evans, who founded the Black Pioneers Project documenting the experience of Black students at UMass Amherst during the late 1960s; Lawrence (Larry) Paros, a UMass alum and forerunner of the Alternative Education movement in America, past director of the 1968 Yale Summer High School (YSHS); and the papers of Dr. Irma McClaurin, BFA founder, which include her photographs of iconic Black figures. The development of the BFA has been supported by two grants from the Wenner Gren Foundation: The Historical Archive Grant and The Global Initiative Grant (GIG) for “The Black Feminist Archive Pandemic Preservation Project of Black Women Practicing Anthropologists” project
Collections include:
Janice M. Irvine, professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is known for her research in the areas of social knowledge production, culture, politics, and sexuality studies. She earned her Ph.D. from Brandeis University, and an MPH in biostatistics and epidemiology from Boston University. She has received two Fulbright Scholarships; a Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America Oral History Grant; a Rockefeller Fellowship at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at CUNY; and an award for Career Achievement and Distinguished Scholarship by the Sexualities Section of the American Sociological Association. Irvine’s books include Talk About Sex: How Sex Ed Battles Helped Ignite the Right; Marginal People in Deviant Places: Ethnography, Difference, and the Challenge to Scientific Racism; and Disorders of Desire: Sexuality and Gender in Modern American Sexology. Irvine is also the author of numerous articles, and editor or coeditor of several volumes of essays.
The Janice M. Irvine Oral History Collection consists of oral histories conducted by Irvine over the course of more than a decade. Including interviews that were part of the research for her book Marginal People in Deviant Places, the collection also emphasizes experiences of people researching, using, or prescribing psychedelics for medical, psychological, spiritual, or mystical purposes, as well as individuals and groups engaged in or welcoming difference and creating or inhabiting alternative spaces. Interviews will go online as the files and metadata are prepared.
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.
A New York native with a deep commitment to social justice, Bernard Jaffe was an attorney, confidant, and longtime friend of W. E. B. Du Bois and Shirley Graham Du Bois. In 1951, Jaffe joined Du Bois’s defense team at a time when the civil rights leader was under indictment for failing to register as a foreign agent. Forging a close relationship through that experience, he was retained as a personal attorney, representing the Du Bois family interests after they settled abroad. Jaffe was later instrumental in placing the papers of both W. E. B. Du Bois and Shirley Graham Du Bois and served on the executive board of the W. E. B. Du Bois Foundation, set up by Shirley’s son, David Graham Du Bois.
This rich collection centers on the close relationship between attorney Bernard Jaffe and his friends and clients, Shirley Graham Du Bois and W. E. B. Du Bois. Although there is little correspondence from W. E. B. Du Bois himself, the collection contains an exceptional run of correspondence with Shirley, from the time of her emigration to Ghana in 1961 until her death in China in 1977 and excellent materials relating to David Graham Du Bois and the work of the W. E. B. Du Bois Foundation.
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.
A Registered Nurse and surgical assistant at Marquette University Medical and Dental Schools, Isabel Jansen was a long-time opponent of fluoridation of drinking water. In 1949, her hometown of Antigo, Wisconsin, became one of the first in the state to put fluorides in its water supply. Jansen emerged as a prominent voice in opposition, arguing that fluorides had a cumulative toxic effect when ingested over a long period, and using public health data, she concluded that fluoridation was strongly correlated with an increase in mortality from heart disease and with a variety of other deleterious health effects. In 1960, she succeeded in ending fluoridation, however after a follow up survey showed a dramatic rise in tooth decay, Antigo residents voted five years later to reintroduce fluoride. Jansen has continued a vigorous resistance, publishing a series of articles on the public health impact and Fluoridation : A Modern Procrustean Practice (1990) and .
The Jansen Papers include a range of correspondence, newsclippings, articles, and notes regarding Isabel Jansen’s long struggle against the fluoridation of drinking water.
Access restrictions: Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA in advance to request materials from this collection.
An attorney and activist, Wayne Jaquith has been a prominent figure in the environmental and peace movements since the 1980s. A graduate of Cornell University and the Northeastern University School of Law (1977), Jaquith served as an officer in a remarkable series of organizations, including as executive director of the Nantucket Land Council, Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Lawyers Alliance for Nuclear Arms Control, and the Ploughshares Fund. He was also a co-founder of Professionals Coalition for Nuclear Arms Control, the Coalition for the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Dangers, and the Arms Transfer Working Group.
Reflecting Jacquith’s diverse interests, this collection includes important materials relating to the peace, environmental, and antinuclear movements, including the Nuclear Freeze movement of the early 1980s. The collection has a rich assortment of newsletters and communications between activist organizations, along with background information, research, and writing.
Dr. Deborah Johnson-Simon, PhD, is a museum anthropologist dedicated to advancing social justice and fostering community engagement through cultural heritage projects. She focuses on attracting and maintaining African American audiences and works extensively on museum outreach and development. Dr. Johnson-Simon is the co-editor of The Second Generation of African American Pioneers in Anthropology, a work that highlights significant contributions in the field.
She is the founder and CEO of the African Diaspora Museology Institute (ADMI), formerly known as the Center for the Study of African and African Diaspora Museums and Communities (CFSAADMC). The institute is committed to conducting and distributing research on the history and culture of African and African Diaspora museums and communities, furthering the understanding of their impact and significance. Dr. Johnson-Simon’s research interests center on these communities’ cultural and historical narratives, emphasizing their role in museum studies and broader cultural heritage.
Dr. Johnson-Simon received her BA from Rollins College in 1997 and her MA from Arizona State University with a certification in Museum Studies. She earned her PhD in 2007 from the University of Florida in 2007.
The Deborah Johnson-Simon Papers document Dr. Johnson-Simon’s research, travels, and professional engagements. The collection includes photographs from her research in Arizona, culminating in Culture Keepers Arizona, as well as ephemera from her time at Rollins College in Florida and her research and teaching at Santa Fe Community College in Gainesville, Florida. It also highlights her extensive work with and on Rev. Dr. C.T. Vivian and the C.T. Vivian Leadership Institute. Additionally, the collection contains an extensive collection of cards from individuals she met at conferences, during research, and while traveling. Notably, it includes her work with industrial designer Charles “Chuck” Harrison, who revolutionized the View-Master, along with a View-Master and more than 80 accompanying slides.
