Collecting area: UMass history

Following a series of homophobic incidents on the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1985, the Program for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Concerns was established as an administrative center in the Office of Student Affairs. Later renamed after the notorious riots in New York, the Stonewall Center has provided the campus and surrounding community with cultural and educational programming through speakers, films, video and book library, Speakers Bureau on LGBTQ issues, referrals and support, advocacy and community outreach.

The records of the Stonewall Center include documentation of day to day operations, including phone logs, memos, and budget information, as well as posters and press releases for events, publications, campus and external reports, training manuals, surveys, newspaper clippings, and ephemera such as banners, tee-shirts, and buttons.

A native of Boston and graduate of Boston Latin School and Harvard, Bill Strickland was a scholar, activist, and longtime member of the Department of Afro-American Studies at UMass Amherst. After fulfilling his service with the Marine Corps, Strickland became active in civil rights and Black liberation work, serving as Executive Director of the Northern Student Movement, working in Mississippi for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and then as Northern Coordinator of the Party’s Congressional Challenge. He was a founding member of Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity in 1964 and in 1969, was also a founding member of the Institute of the Black World in Atlanta. An exacting scholar, Strickland was a key member of the faculty in Afro-American Studies at UMass Amherst teaching history and politics and held a number of important roles, including acting as Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. He retired in 2013.

The Strickland Papers contain materials from two of Strickland’s many commitments during his time at UMass: the presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow People’s Party in 1988 and an initiative to commemorate the complex life and legacy of Jackie Robinson in 1996-1997. Additional materials for Strickland are included in the records of the Department of Afro-American Studies.

John D. Strong was a professor of Physics and Astronomy from 1967 to 1975 and served as the head of the laboratory of astrophysics and physical meteorology. Strong, one of the world’s foremost optical scientists, was known for being the first to detect water vapor in the atmosphere of Venus and for developing a number of innovations in optical devices, ranging from improved telescope mirrors to anti-reflective coatings for optical elements and diffraction gratings. Born in Riverdale, Kansas in 1905, Strong received degrees from the University of Kansas (BA 1926) and the University of Michigan (M.S., 1928, Ph.D., 1930). After twelve years at CalTech and wartime research at Harvard on infrared systems, Strong became professor and director of the Astrophysical and Physical Meteorology Laboratories at Johns Hopkins University in 1946, where, among many other projects, he conducted research on balloon astronomy for the Office of Naval Research (ONR). Strong published hundreds of papers throughout his career and was author of Procedures of Experimental Physics, a standard physics textbook for many years. Strong served as president of the American Optical Association in 1959 and patented numerous inventions for optics in spectroscopy as well as golf (see US Patent no. 3720467). Strong passed away in 1992.

The Strong Papers contain forty years of research notebooks in experimental physics (1930-1970) centered on Strong’s years at Johns Hopkins (1946-1967), along with correspondence, printed publications by Strong for the ONR, and manuscripts for several textbooks (though lacking material on Procedures of Experimental Physics). Strong’s balloon work is documented by diagrams in his lab books and photographs of the Stratolab at John’s Hopkins, and an oral history of his life was made by the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in 1985, a transcript of which is included in the collection.

A leading researcher on communication and social behavior in termites, Alastair MacDonald Stuart (1931-2009) was born in Glasgow, Scotland in Jan. 4, 1931. After study at Glasgow University and the University of Auckland, he entered Harvard to study entomology under E.O. Wilson, completing his dissertation, Experimental Studies on Communication in Termites, in 1960. Among the early students of the role of pheromones in termite communication, Stuart held appointments at North Carolina State and Chicago before joining the faculty of the Department of Biology in 1970, where he remained until his retirement in 2004.

The Stuart Papers document the career of the entomologist, Alastair Stuart, from his days as a graduate student at Harvard through his long tenure at UMass Amherst. The collection includes a full range of correspondence, manuscripts, and research notes, with some documentation of his teaching responsibilities.

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

Gordon Francis Sutton (1928-2012) began his tenure at the University of Massachusetts Amherst as an Assistant Professor of Sociology. Sutton was later appointed to serve as the Director of the Population and Ecology Studies Program. With an interest in social policy, Sutton’s work focused on evaluating statistical classification systems of metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas. His dissertation on travel patterns in urban communities earned him a PhD in Sociology from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor in 1959. In 1997 Sutton’s son Matthew created the Gordon and Dolores Sutton Scholarship Fund at UMass Amherst to promote ethnic diversity and economic opportunity.

The Sutton Papers contain a wealth of material relating to Sutton’s research in urban sociology, social statistics, and demography.

The author and social critic Harvey Swados (1920-1972) was a graduate of the University of Michigan who embarked on a literary life after service in the Merchant Marine during the Second World War. His first novel, Out Went the Candle (1955), introduced the themes to which Swados would return throughout his career, the alienation of factory workers and the experience of the working class in industrial America. His other works include a widely read collection of stories set in an auto plant, On the Line, the novels False Coin (1959), Standing Fast (1970), and Celebration (1975), and a noted collection of essays A Radical’s America (1962). His essay for Esquire magazine, “Why Resign from the Human Race?,” is often cited as inspiring the formation of the Peace Corps.

The Swados collection includes journals, notes, typewritten drafts of novels and short stories, galley proofs, clippings, and correspondence concerning writings; letters from family, publishers, literary agents, colleagues, friends, and readers, including Richard Hofstadter, Saul Bellow, James Thomas Farrell, Herbert Gold, Irving Howe, Bernard Malamud, and Charles Wright Mills; letters from Swados, especially to family, friends, and editors; book reviews; notes, background material, and drafts of speeches and lectures; financial records; biographical and autobiographical sketches; bibliographies.

Born in Sacramento, Calif., but raised in Colorado, the biological anthropologist Alan C. Swedlund received each of his degrees at the University of Colorado Boulder (PhD, 1970). After a brief stint at Prescott College, Swedlund joined the faculty at UMass Amherst in 1973, where he helped to develop the doctoral program in biological anthropology and chaired the department for five years in the early 1990s. A prolific scholar, he drew upon diverse methodologies drawn from demography, epidemiology, and physical anthropology to explore interactions between cultural processes and human biological conditions in populations ranging from the Ancient Pueblo of the southwestern United States, to contemporary Central America and Yucatan, and historical New England. Among dozens of publications, he was author or editor of seven books, including Shadows in the Valley: A Cultural History of Illness, Death, and Loss in New England, 1840-1916 (2010), Plagues and Epidemics: Infected Spaces Past and Present (2010), and Beyond Germs: Explorations of Indigenous Depopulation in North America (2015). He was granted emeritus status upon his retirement in 2008.

The Swedlund Papers include extensive professional correspondence from his first professional appointment at Prescott College through the time of his retirement, along with numerous grant applications, unpublished papers and talks, and research data. Of particular note are extensive records and data files for his study of nineteenth-century demography in the Connecticut River Valley and Franklin County, Mass.

Sylvia Helen Forman (1944 or 1945-1992) was an anthropologist and educator at the University of California – Berkeley and at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst focusing primarily on the demography, genealogy, and health outcomes of Quechua and Spanish-speaking Indigenous and Mestizo peoples in the Andean regions of Ecuador. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1972 for her study of law and conflict in rural highland Ecuador and the following year she joined the faculty at UMass Amherst. Soon after, she began to teach at UMass Amherst until her death in 1992 at only 48 years old. Forman’s legacy at UMass exists today through her former students, her substantial research, and her contributions to the Department of Anthropology, namely its Junior Year Writing program and the Sylvia Forman Third World scholarship fund (which was initially funded by a $100,000 grant from her estate).

Throughout the entirety of her life and her career, Forman was passionately dedicated to feminist and other social justice causes in the United States, in Ecuador, and elsewhere. From early in her career, she stood out as an advocate for her students and was instrumental in building cross-connections among anthropologists in the Five Colleges Consortium to expand opportunities for study, and she also forged strong connections with academics in the developing programs in Women’s Studies. She would later be recognized posthumously as one the founders of the Association for Feminist Anthropology in 1998.

Sylvia Helen Forman’s work in Ecuador can generally be split into two periods, the first of which corresponds roughly to 1966-1975, and the second from around 1976-1981, but she continued to work with contacts in the region long after. The former period saw more direct involvement and travel in Andean Ecuador, while the latter saw fewer trips and less extensive fieldwork. Regardless, both periods focused on similar topics of demography, genealogy, and medical experiences. Forman also did continue to travel to the region after these main research periods, but fewer materials are available from after 1981. Each series in this collection contains different parts of Forman’s work in Ecuador, her professional life, her personal life, and an array of pamphlets, postcards, and other ephemera she collected along the way. The majority of the content available is research-related and typically consists of field notes, data, diaries, and journals.

Co-founded by Madeleine Charney, Lena Fletcher, and Kris Nelson, Talking Truth began as a workshop on climate activism held during the Fall of 2015. The original workshop focused on the overwhelming nature of the climate crisis and provided a three part discussion aimed at helping UMass Amherst students, faculty, and librarians find their individual voices as activists and to support collaboration among UMass community members in their efforts to combat climate change. The discussion included a letter writing activity asking writers to share their feelings about climate change. This activity originated in Fletcher’s Natural Resources Conservation course, “Environment and Society” and more letters were written at subsequent Talking Truth events. Through 2018, Talking Truth held a variety of other events including film screenings, author talks, and a booth at the Amherst, Mass. Sustainability Festival.

The Talking Truth Collection consists of letters written during Talking Truth workshops, events, and in Lena Fletcher’s classes. There is also a small group of drawings done as part of the “Teach-in, freak out: building power in a climate of urgency” on November 19th, 2015, which was sponsored by the UMass Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaign.

The agronomist Roscoe Thatcher served as the last president of Massachusetts Agricultural College and the first when the institution changed its name to Massachusetts State College in 1931. Before coming to Amherst, Thatcher had extensive experience in both agricultural research and administration, having served as director of the agricultural station for the state of Washington, as professor of plant chemistry at the University of Minnesota (1913-1917), and as dean of the School of Agriculture and director of the Minnesota Experiment Station (1917-1921), and as director of the New York Agricultural Experiment Station at Geneva. Selected as President of the Massachusetts Agricultural College in 1927, he helped expand the two year program in practical agriculture to become the Stockbridge School of Agriculture and oversaw curricular reform, orienting vocational training toward citizenship education. The student health service also started during his tenure. Thatcher resigned due to ill health in 1933. Although he returned to research in agricultural chemistry at the College in April 1933, he died in his laboratory on December 6, 1933.

Official and administrative correspondence, memos, and other papers, relating to Thatcher’s service as president of Massachusetts State College together with writing and biographical material.