Collecting area: Social change

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

A native of Washington, D.C., and graduate of the University of Wisconsin (1970) and Loyola University of Chicago Law School (1973), Norman Blumenthal moved to La Jolla, Calif., in 1976 to accept a position as Chief Operating Officer and General Counsel for an oil and gas exploration company. After twelve years in the corporate sector, Blumenthal entered private practice, shifting focus to the protection of employees, consumers, and securities buyers from unfair business practices and pursuing both class action and individual cases. Among other notable cases, Blumenthal led a class action suit against the city of Escondido, Calif. (Coshow v. City of Escondido, 132 Cal. App. 4th 687), arguing that their decision to fluoridate the city water supply in 2001 amounted to “mass medicating the entire community” without consent using chemicals that were known to be carcinogenic. In 2005, the court upheld the City’s fluoridation plan.

The Blumenthal collection represents the extensive legal and research files employed by the plaintiffs in Coshow v. Escondido and the appeals that ensued, including correspondence, litigants’ files, depositions, exhibits, “expert documents,” research materials and drafts, “extras.”

Educator, sociologist, scholar, and author. Includes personal and professional correspondence; administrative and teaching records; research data; manuscripts of published and unpublished speeches, articles and books; photographs; and Bond family papers, especially those of Horace Bond’s father, James Bond. Fully represented are Bond’s two major interests: black education, especially its history and sociological aspects, and Africa, particularly as related to educational and political conditions.

Correspondents include many notable African American educators, Africanists, activists, authors and others, such as Albert C. Barnes, Claude A. Barnett, Mary McLeod Bethune, Arna Bontemps, Ralph Bunche, Rufus Clement, J.G. St. Clair Drake, W.E.B. Du Bois, Edwin Embree, John Hope Franklin, E. Franklin Frazier, W.C. Handy, Thurgood Marshall, Benjamin E. Mays, Pauli Murray, Kwame Nkrumah, Robert Ezra Park, A. Phillip Randolph, Lawrence P. Reddick, A.A. Schomburg, George Shepperson, Carter G. Woodson and Monroe Work.

A nationally renowned labor arbitrator and writer, Tim L. Bornstein graduated from Harvard Law School in 1957. After stints working for Goldberg, Feller & Bredhoff in Washington, D.C., the National Labor Relations Board, and the Retail Clerks International Union, Bornstein joined the faculty at UMass Amherst in 1969, becoming a Professor of Law and Industrial Relations in the Business School. He taught at UMass for twenty years, maintaining a practice in arbitration and mediation all the while. During his career, Bornstein served as a Vice President and Governor for the National Academy of Arbitrators and has wrote two books and numerous articles on labor law and arbitration. He died on June 3, 2019.

Bornstein’s professional interest in organized labor translated into collecting historical memorabilia from the labor movement. His collection contains a range of union-related convention badges and buttons, broadsides, union cards, small banners, and other ephemeral items.

A constructed language developed by a Polish physician, L.L. Zamenhof, and first published in 1887, Esperanto is the most widely spoken auxiliary language in the world. Fundamentally utopian in origin, Esperanto is a simplified and highly rationalized language derived from a pastiche of languages, primarily European. By creating a universal second language, Zamenhof hoped that Esperanto would help transcend national and cultural boundaries and thus promote peace and understanding in a fractious world. Allan Boschen, an engineer with General Electric in Pittsfield, was a student and teacher of Esperanto and longtime officer with the Esperanto Society of New England.

The Esperanto book collection includes instructional materials in the language from around the world along with a diversity of imprints ranging from novels and poetry to travel books, histories and biographies, political writings, materials on China and Vietnam, children’s literature, and even a cookbook. We expect to add to the collection in future.

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

In the fall 1987, a working group was formed in Boston to help coordinate planning for HIV-related services, prevention, and education. The Boston AIDS Consortium began operations the following January with the goal of ensuring effective services for people affected by HIV/AIDS and enabling them to live healthy and productive lives. In its eighteen year existence, the Consortium worked with over seventy public and private agencies and two hundred individuals.

The Records of the Boston AIDS Consortium provide valuable insight into community-based mobilization in response to the AIDS epidemic.

For years, Mitzi Bowman and her husband Pete were stalwarts of the progressive community in Connecticut, and tireless activists in the movements for social justice, peace, and the environment. Shortly after their marriage in 1966, the Bowman’s settled in Newtown and then in Milford, Conn., where Pete worked as an engineer and where Mitzi had trouble finding employment due to her outspoken ways. In close collaboration, the couple became ardent opponents of the war in Vietnam as well as opponents of nuclear weaponry. The focus of their activism took a new direction in 1976, when they learned of plans to ship spent nuclear fuel rods near their home. Founding their first antinuclear organization, STOP (Stop the Transport of Pollution), they forced the shipments to be rerouted, and they soon devoted themselves to shutting down nuclear power in Connecticut completely, including the Millstone and Connecticut Yankee facilities, the latter of which was decommissioned in 1996. The Bowmans were active in a wide array of other groups, including the New Haven Green Party, the Connecticut Coalition Against Millstone, the People’s Action for Clean Energy (PACE), and they were founding members of Fight the (Utility Rate) Hike, the Progressive Action Roundtable, and Don’t Waste Connecticut. Two years after Pete died on Feb. 14, 2006 at the age of 78, Mitzi relocated to Vermont, carrying on her activism.
The Bowman Papers center on Mitzi and Pete Bowman’s antinuclear activism, dating from their first forays with STOP in the mid-1970s through the growth of opposition to Vermont Yankee in the approach to 2010. The collection offers a valuable glimpse into the early history of grassroots opposition to nuclear energy and the Bowmans’ approach to organizing and their connections with other antinuclear activists and to the peace and environmental movements are reflected in an extensive series of notes, press releases, newsclippings, talks, ephemera, and correspondence. The collections also includes extensive subject files on radiation, nuclear energy, peace, and related topics.

Sparked in January 1789 by the efforts of Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II to remake politics in the Austrian-dominated Low Countries, the Brabant Revolution began with a series of intense riots coupled with rising political opposition to foreign rule. After a rebel army defeated Austrian forces at the Battle of Turnhout in Oct. 1789, the revolution gained steam and by December, the Brabant declared its indepedence, forming the new United States of Belgium. Although resistance to Austrian rule spread throughout the region and several key towns fell to the rebels, the new state was fragile and gained little support from foreign powers. After dissension began to afflict the revolutionary ranks, pitting conservative “Statists” against allegedly anticlerical “Vonckists,” Emperor Leopold II (successor to Joseph) moved in in force. By the end of 1790, the rebellion was crushed.

The Brabant Revolution produced a vigorous literature on all sides, favoring and opposing revolution, representing the various factional interests, and the wide range of ideologies and political ideas wrapped up in the revolutionary struggle. The collection (also known as the Collection Brabançonne) consists of dozens of pamphlets and books issued in the years 1789 and 1790, many of exceptional scarcity, reflecting a rising national consciousness that resulted in the formation of the modern state of Belgium. The publications are written primarily in French or Dutch.

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

Sigrid Brauner was born in Hofheim, Germany, earning her BA from the University of Frankfurt before immigrating to the United States. Brauner completed her PhD in German literature at the University of California Berkeley in 1989 and later the same year joined the faculty at UMass Amherst in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature. Brauner, who served on the executive committee of the Women’s Studies Program, remained at UMass until her death in December 1992.

The papers reflect Sigrid Brauner’s interest in race and gender as well as her research in anthropology and theology. “Witches: Myth and Reality,” the popular course Brauner taught during the fall 1992 semester, is represented in the collection along with other notes for research and teaching. Professional correspondence as well as political and social change periodicals comprise the remainder of the Brauner Papers. A fair portion of the collection is in German.

Born in Germany in 1923, Gerard Braunthal was a scholar of German politics and taught as a professor in the Political Science department from 1954. Before receiving his B.A. from Queens College in 1947, Braunthal served in intelligence during World War II, going on to receive his M.A. from the University of Michigan in 1948 and Ph.D from Columbia University in 1953. While studying at Columbia, Braunthal worked as an interviewer for US Air Force intelligence. An expert on the German Social Democratic party (SPD), Braunthal published extensively on modern German politics. His work on the subject was well regarded in Germany as well as the United States. In parallel to his academic research, Braunthal was also an anti-war and anti-nuclear activist, serving on the executive committees of both the Valley Peace Center and the Citizens for Participation in Political Action (CPPAX). Braunthal received the Order of Merit from the German government.

The collection includes Braunthal’s correspondence, article manuscripts and research materials, as well as pamphlets, form-letters, and broadsides relating to anti-Vietnam war activism, interspersed with a small amount of personal correspondence from his own antiwar activities. Among his research materials is a collection of interview transcripts with members of the Federation of German Industry (BDI). There is also a significant collection of documents from his involvement with local activist groups, which includes minutes, form-letters, reports, conference proceedings, and leaflets.

Mark Taylor Brinsfield studied languages and law in Europe before receiving his MA in European Studies at the University of Exeter. His research has included work in the history of multiracial people in post-World War II Southeast Asia. Brinsfield currently lives in Northampton, Mass.

The posters in the Brinsfield Collection represent a cross-section of West German political campaigning during the decade leading up to reunification. Focused primarily on national, rather than regional elections, the collection includes representative work from the major left- and right-leaning political parties (CDU and RCDS, SDU, the Greens) as well as a few posters addressed at major political issues, including the antinuclear and antiwar movements.