Collecting area: UMass history

After earning her masters degree from Smith College in 1951, Doris Abramson (class of 1949) returned to UMass in 1953 to become instructor in the English Department, remaining at her alma mater through a long and productive career. An historian of theatre and poet, she was a founding member of the Speech Department, Theatre Department, and the Massachusetts Review. In 1959, a Danforth grant helped Abramson pursue doctoral work at Columbia. Published in 1969, her dissertation, Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre, 1925-1969, was a pioneering work in the field. After her retirement, she and her partner of more than 40 years, Dorothy Johnson, ran the Common Reader Bookshop in New Salem.
An extensive collection covering her entire career, Abramson’s papers are a valuable record of the performing arts at UMass, her research on African American playwrights, her teaching and directing, and many other topics relating to her diverse interests in literature and the arts.

During the academic year 1986-1987, the campus at UMass Amherst was a hotbed of political protest, fueled in part by the US intervention in Central America. The arrival on campus of a CIA recruiting officer in November set off a string of demonstrations that attracted the support of activists Abbie Hoffman and Amy Carter, daughter of former president Jimmy Carter. The occupation of the Whitmore Administration Building was followed by a larger occupation of adjacent Munson Hall, resulting in a number of arrests. Hoffman, Carter, and eleven co-defendants were tried and acquitted on charges of disorderly conduct were tried in April 1987.

The Collection contains 61 mounted photographs of marches, demonstrations, and protests in Amherst and Northampton, Mass., taken by Charles F. Carroll, Byrne Guarnotta, and Libby Hubbard, all students at UMass Amherst. The photographs are a vivid record of campus and community activism, and particularly the mobilization against the CIA and American intervention in Central America, as well as the arrest and trial of Abbie Hoffman and Amy Carter.

Born on Dec. 1, 1921, to a middle class family, Tamas Aczel became affiliated with leftist politics in Hungary prior to the Second World War, joining the Party after. With degrees in literature from Peter Pazmany University (BA 1948) and Eotvos Lorent University (MA 1950), Aczel quickly established a reputation as a literary talent, publishing seven novels and winning the Kossuth Prize (1949) and Stalin Prize for Literature (1952). During this period, he became disenchanted with the Communist government and during the short-lived rebellion in 1956, he served as press secretary for Prime Minister Imre Nagy. When Nagy was deposed, Aczel escaped through Yugoslavia to Austria and then England. In 1966, he was invited to teach modern European literature at UMass, where he became Director of the MFA program (1978-1982). Aczel died in 1994, leaving his wife Olga A. Gyarmati (an Olympic gold medalist in the long jump, 1948) and son Thomas.

The Aczel collection consists primarily of numerous drafts of several novels, including The Hunt (1990), Illuminations (1981), and Ice Age (1965), along with other writing, translations, some student essays, and autobiographical material. Some material is in Hungarian.

Georgiana and Mason Adams, ca. 1880.

Son of Nathaniel Dickinson Adams and Harriet Hastings, Charles Dickinson Adams (1839-1889) was valedictorian at Amherst College, finished the 2-year law program at Columbia in one year, and practiced law in New York City until his early death. He was active in church and community work, and married Mary Clark Wood. The couple had two children, Georgiana and Mason. In 1905, Georgiana Wood Adams (1874-1957) married Franklin Hubbell Mills, the only son of George Franklin Mills, a classics teacher and later Dean at the Massachusetts Agricultural College. George’s father, Benjamin F. Mills, started the Greylock Institute which was active several decades, and both Franklin and his father George were graduates of Williams College. Franklin and Georgiana Mills lived in New York City, and had one child, Mary Mills (1908-1963). Mason Tyler Adams (1877-1933) married Juliette Emily Hubbell, and the couple had two children. Many in the Adams-Mills-Wood extended family are buried at Wildwood Cemetery in Amherst, MA, as Mary Clark Adams and her mother-in-law Harriet bought two side-by-side lots for the family.

The Adams-Mills Family papers document three core generations of the Adams and Mills families with roots in western Massachusetts. Manuscript material, ephemera and numerous photographs document Charles Dickinson Adams, his wife Mary Clark Wood Adams, and George Franklin Mills; the merging of their families through Georgiana Wood Adams Mills and Franklin Hubbell Mills; and their children, other family, and friends. Highlights include Mary Mills’ baby book, over 20 years of correspondence from Mason to his sister Georgiana, correspondence between other family members reflecting attitudes and events in the late 1800s through mid-1900s, several travel journals and scrapbooks, and records from local schools such as Massachusetts Agricultural College, Amherst College, and Williams College. Over one-third of the collection is photographs, reflecting photographic technology, clothing styles, vacation spots, and home aesthetics from the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

Leonard Adams (1946-) began his career with the UMass Amherst Libraries in May 1974 when he was hired to work as an Exit Check on the night shift. Before earning his MLS at the University of Rhode Island in 1975, Adams worked in Circulation and Serials, after which he became Serials Cataloger and Bindery Supervisor, and in 1980, Government Documents Librarian. He added Patents and Trademarks to his job duties in 2004. A founding member of the Boston Library Consortium’s Government Documents Interest Group, Leonard Adams served the UMass Amherst Libraries for 33 years before his retirement in May 2008.

Adams’s papers provide insight into the inner-workings of a Government Documents Repository and convey, even in their brevity, the nature of the work of a Government Documents librarian. Included among the papers are professional correspondence, a Government Documents Technical Processing Manual and articles written by Adams, Adams’s annual reports and performance reviews, and other documents relating to Adams’s long tenure at the University Libraries.

Maurianne Adams was one of the pioneers in social justice education at UMass Amherst. Arriving at the university in 1973 as Coordinator of Academic Affairs for Project 10, the experimental residential education program in the Southwest Residential Area, she developed an elective curriculum focused on racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, and ableism. When that project was ended in 1982, she took her ideas to the School of Education, where she became the Director for Social Issues and Instructional Development for Residential Academic Programs (RAP). Over the next several years, she and her colleagues developed one of the first general education diversity courses and she became part of the founding faculty for the graduate program in Social Justice Education. Since her retirement in 2015, she has remained active in promoting social justice activities working with the Coalition of Amherst Neighborhoods (CAN) and the Amherst Community Land Trust, which provides opportunities for affordable homeownership.

The Maurianne Adams Papers document a career committed to teaching, learning, and writing about diversity and equality on this campus and in the residential neighborhoods nearby. The papers offer an important perspective on the emergence of social justice courses in the General Education Program and the formation of the Social Justice Education Program within the College of Education, and given the extensive collaboration among social justice education faculty, it includes materials from several of Adams’ colleagues. The collection includes early drafts of curricula; course and workshop materials on diversity, inclusive teaching, religious oppression, anti-Semitism, and classism; and materials relating to grants to support her efforts.

A poet and translator of Kashmiri descent, Agha Shahid was raised in a household where poetry was recited in Persian, Urdu, Hindi, and English. Born in New Delhi on February 4, 1949, he was educated at the University of Kashmir, Srinagar, and University of Delhi, earning earned a doctorate in English from Pennsylvania State University in 1984 and an MFA from the University of Arizona in 1985. The author of nine volumes of poetry, and widely anthologized, Ali was on faculty in the MFA Program at University of Massachusetts Amherst, when he died of brain cancer in December, 2001.

This small collection contains copies of Ali’s first two books, Bone-Sculpture (1972) and In Memory of Begum Akhtar (1979), a self-produced chapbook, and a rough manuscript of poems. All are inscribed to his colleague and friend Zabelle Stodola.

A long-time faculty member at UMass Amherst, Dean Albertson was a twentieth century U.S. historian with a specialty in oral history. A veteran of the Second World War, Albertson received his BA from University of California Berkeley (1942) and doctorate from Columbia (1955), joining the Department of History at UMass in 1965 after several years at Brooklyn College. Interested throughout his career in new methods in research and teaching history, he was author of books on Dwight Eisenhower, Claude Wickard (Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of Agriculture), and the student movements of the 1960s. Albertson died at his home in Longmeadow, Mass., on March 31, 1989, at the age of 68.

The Albertson Papers consist of the records of three summer institutes in history at UMass run during the summer 1966-1968, and funded by the National Defence Education Act (NDEA). Aimed at high school teachers of social sciences and history in western Massachusetts, the institutes were designed to provide in-service training and to expose teachers to newer material and techniques in teaching U.S. history. See also Dean Albertson’s collection of oral histories.

Charles Paul Alexander, a professor and head of the Entomology Department from 1922 until 1959, was the international expert on the crane fly (Tipulidae). Alexander was born in Gloversville, New York in 1889, earned his B.S. (1913) and Ph.D. (1918) from Cornell University and joined the Massachusetts Agricultural College faculty in 1922. Alexander became the head of the Entomology Dept. and the Zoology Dept. in 1937 and then the dean of the the School of Science in 1945 and while at the University, classified nearly 13,000 species of crane fly. His personal collection of crane flies is held by the Smithsonian Institute. Alexander died in 1981.

The Charles Paul Alexander Papers contains mainly Alexander’s published reports on the crane fly as well as some of his lecture notes.

Dean Alfange, Jr. was a professor in the political science department at UMass Amherst teaching constitutional law and civil liberties until his retirement in 1999. During that time he also served in the positions of Dean of the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Acting Provost. Growing up on New York’s West Side, he earned a B.A. at Hamilton College in 1950. He served in the military from 1952 to 1957; this was followed by twenty years of serving in the Air Force Reserves, retiring in 1980 at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. In 1960 he earned a master’s degree from the University of Colorado followed by a doctorate from Cornell University in 1967. During his teaching career he received distinguished teaching awards from both Lafayette and UMass. The Dean Alfange Lecture Series in Constitutional Law was funded by a group of former students and brought distinguished scholars in that field to speak annually. Following his retirement from teaching, he was able to pursue his interest in the arts and became a supporter of several small theatrical groups in New York City.

The Alfange papers contain a small array of correspondence, photographs, course syllabi, handwritten lecture notes, writings, awards, and documents related to the Alfange lecture series. A small amount of files relate to his time in the military and his interest in theater and music.