Collecting area: Peace

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.

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

The Traprock Peace Center is a grassroots organization based in Deerfield, Massachusetts, that trains and educates people locally and globally in matters relating to disarmament and nonviolence. In 1980, the Center organized the first successful attempt in the United States to get a nuclear weapons moratorium referendum on the ballot, and the Center has served as a focal point for organizing on a wide array of issues in peace and social and environmental justice.

The records of Traprock Peace Center include correspondence, campaign materials (resolutions, organizing committee records, legislative packets), program reports, newsletters, newsclippings, and posters relating to the nuclear freeze campaign and many subsequent initiatives. Recent additions to the collection document the group’s work to end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; these later additions are open for research, but are not processed.

Although the precise origins of UMass Peacemakers are murky, by 1982, the group was an active presence on the UMass Amherst campus organizing opposition to militarism and the nuclear arms race and providing support for the nuclear freeze movement. Organizing vigils, demonstrations, informational workshops, and providing civil disobedience training, the Peacemakers were the most visible pacifist group on the UMass Amherst campus in the 1980s.

The UMass Peacemakers Records focus on the activities of the student group between 1983 and 1990, documenting their role in confronting the aggressive international expansionism of the Reagan administration and its “Star Wars” program, while also engaging at the local and national level by organizing rallies, lectures, poetry readings, and film screenings. At UMass, Peacemakers was part of the larger Progressive Student Network, and worked alongside other student organizations including the Radical Student Union.

UVC logo

Founded in 1976, originally under the name of the Student Video Project, UMass’ Union Video Center was planned as early as 1972 and quickly gained popularity alongside the general rise of public access television in the late 70s. The UVC’s mission has been consistent throughout its existence, emphasizing their ability to offer students the opportunity to work in/with video production in a structured and organized manner that, at the time, was not generally accessible. Through the UVC’s workshops, students are taught the various aspects of the video production process, surrounding areas such as cinematography, lighting, editing, screenwriting and more. Through these UVC workshops the organization created a community through media made by UMass students. The variety of programs created through UVC are extremely diverse and include original programs like UMass This Week, the UMass Sports Weekly Show, a comedy sketch show known as Yak Back, dating shows and others, as well as documenting hundreds of events on campus. The organization was shepherded in its early years by early founders/directors such as Mark Chesak, David Skillicorn, Irene Starr, Mark Gunning, and Dennis Martin, in addition to many student staff and volunteers.

UVC began with an investment of $30-$40,000 of half inch reel to reel EIAJ video equipment. They were, and still are, one of the few student agencies that receives funding from the Student Government Association, as opposed to other student run organizations that have a budget allocated for them. This difference in funding is specifically garnered for student agencies that are seen as integral to strengthening the student experience at UMass.

Throughout the UVC’s extensive history, they have covered an array of important UMass and community events such as concerts/festivals, distinguished lectures, campus protests, independent student films, sporting events and much more. This collection contains over 3,000 recordings and are on an array of different video formats such as Betamax, VHS, SVHS, EIAJ, CDs, DVDs, VHSC, miniDV, and eventually to digital files and a YouTube channel.  Some highlights from the collection include substantial coverage of artists who have performed at UMass including the Sun Ra Orchestra, Archie Shepp, Jonathan Richman, Black Flag, The Wailers, Dinosaur Jr., Max Roach, Sweet Honey in the Rock and countless others. Other highlights include sizable coverage of UMass’ diverse community events such as the Asian American Student Association’s Asian night celebrations. Furthermore, UVC’s vast coverage of activism and political speakers on campus is documented through lectures by Noam Chomsky and James Baldwin as well as student protests against the invasion of Grenada, the US presence in El Salvador, and Iraq invasion teach-ins. Beyond the events that UVC documented, the collection also sheds light on the inner workings of the organization through correspondence, financial documents , and training material. The collection also includes extensive budget planning, yearly reports of the organization’s goals and accomplishments, video workshop teaching materials, guidelines/manuals, UVC alumni networks, and fliers.

Founded in September 1989, the University Anti-Intervention, Disarmament & Conversion Project was developed by individuals in the UMass Amherst community who wanted to eliminate the university’s dependence on defense research. The purpose of the project was to serve as a resource center for students, faculty, and community activists working to break the link between the nation’s institutions of higher learning and the military industrial complex.

The collection consists of a resource guide created by the group.

In the summer of 1967, members of University of Massachusetts Amherst campus groups, such as the Faculty Group on War and Peace and the Students for Political Action, joined with individuals from other area colleges and from the community at large to form the Valley Peace Center of Amherst for the purposes of opposing the Vietnam War, providing draft counseling, eliciting pledges from the government to avoid first use of nuclear and biological weapons, and reduction of the power of the “military-industrial complex”. The Center was active for more than five and a half years, drawing its financial support largely from the community and its human resources from student and community volunteers.

Correspondence, minutes, volunteer and membership lists, financial records, newsletters, questionnaires, notes, petitions, clippings, posters, circulars, pamphlets, periodicals, other printed matter, and memorabilia. Includes material relating to alternative service, boycotts, war tax resistance, prison reform, environmental quality, and political candidates.

Carl Walz was a high school teacher in the town of Montague, Mass., in May 1942 when his status as a conscientious objector cost him his career. Although the School Committee claimed that Walz had been dismissed due to a “marked decrease” in demand for German, a non-required subject, and that his other courses were simply assigned to “higher priority” teachers, the key factor in his dismissal appears to have been his decision to register as a conscientious objector. With support from the Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union, Walz sued the Montague School Committee for wrongful dismissal. He was unsuccessful.

Walz’s suit against the Montague School District over his firing for being a conscientious objector was argued in the Superior Court held in Greenfield in 1943. The typescript is a verbatim transcript of testimony given, including direct and cross-examination of members of the School Board, and re-direct and re-cross examination.

A journalist, writer, and historian, Harvey Wasserman has been an activist for radical democracy and alternative energy for over five decades. Influenced by civil rights activism as a child, Wasserman became seriously involved in journalism while on the staff of the Michigan Daily at the University of Michigan. After graduating in 1967, he joined the Liberation News Service supplying news to underground and alternative media outlets, remaining with the LNS branch that eventually settled on the Montague Farm Commune in Montague, Mass. During more than a decade at the Farm, Wasserman and his fellow communards helped ignite the modern movement opposing nuclear power. Helping to found two vital antinuclear groups, the Alternative Energy Coalition and the Clamshell Alliance, he became a key strategist and organizer of the mass protests at the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant and was a motive force behind the Musicians United for Safe Energy concerts in 1979. His activism has since expanded into a broad range of environmental issues, alternative energy, election protection, and politics. A prolific writer, he is author of Harvey Wasserman’s History of the United States (1972) and Solartopia (2007), among other books, and his articles have appeared in both the mainstream and alternative press.

The Wasserman Papers document the career of a key figure in antinuclear and alternative energy activism. The collection includes a nearly comprehensive set of Wasserman’s writings, materials on the antinuclear movement, solar power, the Montague Farm Commune, and materials relating to his efforts to protect the American electoral system.

The activist Mary Wentworth has worked throughout New England on behalf of a variety of progressive causes, beginning with the antiwar and feminist movements in the 1960s and 1970s and working against racism and other forms of discrimination, militarism, patriarchy, corporate power, and U.S. imperialism. In 1984, she ran for U.S. Congress against long-term incumbent Silvio O. Conte, winning almost 30% of the vote in a district in which Conte had run unopposed.

The Wentworth Papers include records relating to her congressional campaign against Conte, material on U.S. involvement in Central America during the 1980s, and other issues of concern throughout her career.

A convinced Friend who became an advocate for peace, Willis H. White was a member of the East Greenwich Monthly Meeting. A secretary in the Providence-based real estate firm William H. White & Sons, White was active in several organizations promoting peace and spiritual renewal within the Society of Friends in the years after the First World War.

The bulk of Willis H. White’s papers are concentrated on his activities on behalf of peace, social justice, and the Society of Friends in the period 1919-1922. The collection includes materials documenting White’s work with the American Friends Service Committee and on invigorating the Society through the London Conference of All Friends and the evangelical Forward Movement of Friends, and there is a relatively small, but interesting series of letters from the labor and peace activist, A. J. Muste.