The University of Massachusetts Amherst
Robert S. Cox Special Collections & University Archives Research Center
CredoResearch digital collections in Credo

Collecting area: Social change

Tass Sovfoto Photograph Collection

Tass Sovfoto Photograph Collection

1919-1963 Bulk: 1943-1963
111 items 0.5 linear feet
Call no.: PH 010

For many years, Sovfoto, a stock photograph agency based in New York City, was the sole source in the United States for the best work in contemporary Soviet photojournalism. Founded in 1932, the company carried photographers for Tass and, later, other news agencies from throughout the Soviet republics, Eastern Europe, and China.

The Tass Sovfoto Collection depicts Soviet life, primarily in the 1950s and early 1960s. Typically rendered in heroic Soviet style, the photographs are relatively varied in subject, documenting political events (e.g., Communist Party meetings, the meeting of Kennedy and Khrushchev); generals, politicians, and celebrities (Lenin, Khrushchev, Shostakovich); and athletic and cultural events. A few images appear to be parts of photo essays aimed at a popular audience, including images of Jewish life in Russia and the life of a Soviet worker, while others are stock images of Soviet troops during the Second World War.

Subjects

Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917-1963Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeevich, 1894-1971Lenin, Vladimir Il'ich, 1870-1924Shostakovich, Dmitrii Dmitrievich, 1906-1975Soviet Union--PhotographsWorld War, 1939-1945
Tax Equity Alliance of Massachusetts

Tax Equity Alliance of Massachusetts Intiative Collection

1988-1989
1 folder 0.1 linear feet
Call no.: MS 321

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.

Gift of Ken Fones-Wolf, 1990

Subjects

Taxation--Massachusetts
Taylor, Katya Sabaroff

Katya Sabaroff Taylor Papers

1959-2015
2 boxes 3 linear feet
Call no.: MS 871
Depiction of Katya Sabaroff Taylor, 2015
Katya Sabaroff Taylor, 2015

With a B.A. in literature from Antioch College and an M.A. in education from Columbia University, Katya Sabaroff Taylor has worked as a journalist and editor, health educator, women’s studies instructor, massage therapist, yoga teacher, and workshop facilitator. In 1980 she founded Creative Arts and Healing workshops, classes, and retreats to nurture the link between creativity and the healing process.

The collection features a wide range of Taylor’s work, reflecting her lifelong love of writing and teaching. Her poetry, essays, and fiction are included along with her memoirs and personal accounts, the collected writings of several classes of prison inmates enrolled in Taylor’s creative writing workshops, and the recollections of former members of the Liberation News Service.

Subjects

DiaristsLiberation News Service (New York, N.Y.)Prison educatorsWomen authors

Types of material

EssaysMemoirsPoemsShort stories
Textile Workers Union of America. New Bedford Joint Board

TWUA New Bedford Joint Board Records

1942-1981
19 boxes 9 linear feet
Call no.: MS 134

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.

Subjects

Labor unions--MassachusettsTextile workers--Labor unions--Massachusetts

Contributors

Textile Workers Union of America
Thacher-Channing families

Thacher-Channing Family Papers

1757-1930
3 boxes, books 22.5 linear feet
Call no.: MS 1005
Depiction of Stephen Thacher, ca.1853
Stephen Thacher, ca.1853

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.

Gift of Ben Forbes and Fran Soto, 2017

Subjects

Channing familyMaine--Politics and government--19th centuryMassachusetts--Politics and government--19th centuryThacher family

Types of material

AmbrotypesDaguerreotypesPhotographsSilhouettes
Thielman, Jean

Jean Thielman Papers

ca.1960-1980
1 box 1.5 linear feet
Call no.: MS 676

As Secretary for the Citizens Committee Against Fluoridation for Western Pennsylvania, Jean Thielman was one of the key litigants in the landmark 1978 case that halted fluordiation of the water supply in the borough of West View, near Pittsburgh. Having become involved in opposition to fluoridation of the water supply in the 1960s, Thielman was part of a network of activists that included Ellie Rudolph, Eugene Albright, and Martha Bevis.

The Thielman Papers consist of a small assemblage of correspondence and supporting materials pertaining to antifluoridation activism in western Pennsylvania during the mid-1970s.

Gift of Richard M. Bevis, Jan. 2010

Subjects

Antifluoridation movements--Pennsylvania

Contributors

Citizens Committee Against Fluoridation for Western PennsylvaniaThielman, Jean

Types of material

Letters (Correspondence)
Thomas W. Fels Collection

Thomas W. Fels Collection

Bulk: 1953-2015
8 8 linear feet
Call no.: MS 943
Part of: Famous Long Ago Collection
Tom Fels seated on the ground in flip flops at the Montague Farm

Thomas Weston Fels is an artist, author, art historian, writer, and curator. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, 1946, Fels spent his teenage years at The Putney School, a private boarding school in Southern Vermont. Upon completion, Fels enrolled in Amherst College, and after graduating in 1967, moved to the Montague Farm commune. 

Fels lived on the farm from 1969 to 1973, and was an integral member of the larger communard community, extending from the Wendell Farm and Johnson Pasture, to Packer Corners and the Tree Frog Farm. While there, Fels associated with prolific writers, artists and photographers of 1960s counterculture, such as Harvey Wasserman, Ray Mungo, Peter Simon, and others. 

Sometime after leaving the commune, Fels returned to school, attending Williams College. He graduated in 1984, earning a Masters in the History of Art. Following the completion of his degree, Fels was awarded multiple prestigious fellowships. In 1986, he became a Chester Dale Fellow of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while between 1998-1999, he was a Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellow of the Huntington Library, California. His career has seen him employed by numerous museums across North America, ranging from the J. Paul Getty Museum of Art in California, the Elizabeth de C. Wilson Museum in Vermont, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Quebec. 

 Fels has organized many exhibitions throughout his career, some internationally. In California, Fels’ exhibition Carleton Watkins: Western Landscape and the Classical Vision was presented at the J. Paul Getty Museum of Art; while his exhibition Fire and Ice: Treasures from the Photograph Collection of Frederic Church at Olana, was shown at both the Dahesh Museum in New York, and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

In addition to his curatorial duties, Fels’ work as a researcher and writer has led him to publish a variety of catalogs and companion pieces to his exhibitions alongside various articles and books. In 1989, he published O Say Can You See: American Photographs 1839-1939, and in 1994, he edited a single issue of Farm Notes, in some ways a successor to the Montague Commune’s Green Mountain Post (formerly New Babylon Times). In 2008, Fels published the memoir Farm Friends, reflecting on his life, the counterculture era, and his time on the Montague Commune. In the same year, Fels helped found the ‘Famous Long Ago Archive’ at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; collecting the personal papers of several members of the communard community. These collections contain articles, manuscripts, photos, posters, oral histories, and more. He continued to reflect on the Montague Farm, publishing Buying the Farm in 2012, providing an in-depth history of the commune, connecting with communards decades later, while chronicling the farm from its beginning in 1968 through the following thirty-five years of its existence. 

Since 2013, Fels has been showcasing his unique cyanotypes throughout the American Northeast, and by 2015 his art would take him to Europe and the United Kingdom. In 2016, his large, life-sized renderings were subject to sale at one of the world’s most renowned auction houses, Christie’s London. Beyond his photography and historical work, Fels can be found giving lectures throughout New England, or at his home in Southern Vermont. 

The Tom Fels collection reflects the work of the many friends he made while living on the Montague Farm. Their works make up the bulk of the collection, containing articles, manuscripts, publications, photographs, posters, and audio recordings. Of particular interest is the 25th Anniversary reunion of the Montague Commune. The 10-day celebration is memorialized through photos, audio recordings, and a publication. 

Gift of Thomas Fels, 2008

Subjects

Communal living--MassachusettsCounterculture--United States--20th centuryMontague Farm Community (Mass.)

Contributors

Mungo, Raymond, 1946-Oglesby, Carl. 1935-2011Simon, Peter, 1947-Wasserman, Harvey, 1945 -

Types of material

AudiocassettesBlack-and-white photographsNegatives (photographs)PostersTypscripts
Restrictions: none
Thorne, Curtis B.

Curtis B. Thorne Papers

ca.1976-1989
2 boxes 3 linear feet
Call no.: FS 153

Before joining the faculty of the microbial genetics department at UMass Amherst in 1966, Curtis B. Thorne worked as the branch chief at the biolabs in Fort Detrick from 1948-1961 and 1963-1966 where his research focused on Bacillus anthracis, the microbe that causes anthrax. During his tenure at UMass, Curtis applied for and received numerous grants for his continued research on the bacterium, including funding from the U.S. Department of Defense. While his research was centered on the genetics and physiology of the anthrax bacillus, with an emphasis on developing a vaccine, it garnered the unwanted attention of local peace activists in 1989. Protestors, who feared Thorne’s research was linked to germ warfare, picketed outside of his laboratory and demanded that the university reject Pentagon funding. Even though the university and the town of Amherst refused to limit Thorne’s research, he decided not to seek an extension of his contract with the Army in 1990, a decision he regretted having to make. Four years later, Thorne retired from UMass and was honored by his former students with a symposium and dinner. Thorne died in 2008 at the age of 86.

Thorne’s papers consist of lab notebooks and materials relating to the classes he taught at UMass Amherst. Many of the notebooks are related to his research on Bacillus anthracis as well as other microbes including Bacills thuringiensis. His papers do not contain any information related to the funding of his research or the controversy that later surrounded it.

Subjects

Bacillus anthracisBiological weaponsGeneticists--MassachusettsUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst--FacultyUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst. Department of Microbiology

Contributors

Thorne, Curtis B
Thrasher, Sue

Sue Thrasher Poster Collection

ca.1975-2010
50 posters, 1 box 1.5 linear feet
Call no.: MS 861

The activist, writer, and educator, Sue Thrasher became involved in the civil rights movement while a student at Scarritt College in 1961. A native of rural West Tennessee, Thrasher was drawn to the local chapter of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee shortly after arriving on campus, and in 1964, she helped found the Southern Students Organizing Committee, serving as its first executive director and taking part in the “white folks project” during Mississippi Summer. As a stalwart of the freedom movement and its historian, she joined the staff at the Highlander Center in 1978, helping to organize their archives and conducting oral histories. After more than twenty years of social activism in the South, Thrasher came to UMass Amherst to earn a doctorate in Educational Policy and Research, and from 1997 until her retirement in 2013, she worked as Partnership Coordinator at Five Colleges Incorporated, linking faculty with public school districts in western Massachusetts. Among her several works on the civil rights movement is the collaborative volume Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement (2000).

A visual record of Sue Thrasher’s involvement in movements for social justice, the collection includes dozens of posters reflecting international liberation movements (Mozambique, Palestine, Central America), Cuba, the antiwar movement, campaigns for literacy in Nicaragua, the International Council on Adult Education (Chile and Bangladesh), and activities at the Highlander Center (benefit concerts by Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, and Sweet Honey in the Rock). The collection also includes two Nicaraguan masks collected by Thrasher.

Types of material

MasksPosters
Thresholds to Life

Thresholds to Life Records

1983-1986
1 box 0.25 linear feet
Call no.: MS 156

Thresholds to Life is a program developed by psychiatrist Milton Burglass for training prison inmates and offenders on probation about decision making, problem solving, and life planning. It is operated by volunteers in 30 locations in the United States.

The Thresholds to Life collection includes records of the program in Greenfield, Mass., and contains newsletters, minutes, by-laws, treasurer’s reports, correspondence, news clippings, brochures, and lists of volunteers, board members, and staff.

Subjects

Prisoners--Massachusetts--GreenfieldPrisoners--Rehabilitation--Massachusetts--Greenfield