Collecting area: UMass faculty

Henry T. Fernald received his doctorate in Zoology from Johns Hopkins University in 1890, and after nine years on faculty at the Pennsylvania State College, he joined his father on the faculty of the Massachusetts Agricultural College. Like his father, Henry Fernald was an industrious and avid entomologist, and together the two expanded both the undergraduate and graduate curriculum in entomology. In addition to serving as Head of the Department of Entomology, Fernald followed his father as Director of the Graduate School at Massachusetts Agricultural College (1927-1930). A specialist in economic entomology and the systematics of the Hemiptera and Hymenoptera, Fernald also served as President of the Association of Economic Entomologists (1914).

Correspondence with colleagues, College administrators, including President Lewis, and alumni; biographical materials, news clippings and published writings.

The University’s first Dean of Students, William F. Field held the post from 1961 until his retirement in 1988. The 27 years Field was Dean of Students was a critical time of growth and unrest, as the University’s student population more than tripled in size and the nation-wide movements for civil rights and against the Vietnam War were reflected through student activism and protest on the University’s campus. Responsible for ending student curfews and overseeing all dorms becoming co-ed, Field also worked with minority students and faculty to support the Black Arts Movement on campus and the founding of the W.E.B Du Bois Afro-American Studies Department.

The William F. Field Papers document Field’s career as an administrator at the University of Massachusetts and specifically his role as Dean of Students from 1961-1988. The correspondence, memoranda, reports, notes, and other official printed and manuscript documents are a rich resource for one of the most important and volatile eras in the University’s history. Of particular interest are extensive files on student protests and activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the growing diversity of the campus student population, flourishing of the Black Arts Movement on campus and the founding of the W.E.B. Du Bois Afro-American Studies Department.

Established as a pilot project in the fall of 1974, the Women’s Studies program at UMass Amherst was proposed by the Faculty Senate Committee on Women in 1973. The committee asked for a two-year mandate to develop the pilot project into a permanent program with a major and certificate minor by the fall of 1976. Despite the steady growth of the department over the next few years, the university offered minimal financial support. There were roadblocks, too, on the way to becoming a permanent program. Even after the Faculty Senate voted to approve a five-year extension of the program, university administrators continued to delay awarding the program independent degree-granting status. Finally, on April 30, 1980, the Women’s Studies Program received the approval of the Chancellor.

This collection consists of materials displayed as part of an exhibit curated by Lisa Baskin that celebrates the history of Women’s Studies Programs at UMass Amherst and in the Five Colleges, including photographs, reports, publications, and course catalogs.

H.J. Franklin was an expert cranberry grower and a trained entomologist, whose research centered on the bumble bee. Franklin would wed these two interests in his career at the University, where he studied the cranberry pollination habits of the bumble bee and oversaw the cultivation of cranberries at the University’s Cranberry Experiment Station at Wareham, which Franklin founded and directed from 1909 until he retired in 1953. Born in Guildford, Vermont in 1883, Franklin moved to Bernardston, Mass. when he was eleven, eventually attending the University of Massachusetts, where he earned his B.S in 1903, and Ph.D in 1912. Franklin spent his career and life with cranberries, owning and managing his own bogs in three eastern Massachusetts counties and working with cranberry producers to develop the industry. Franklin died in 1958 in Wareham, Mass.

The H.J. Franklin Papers document his research on the bumble bee as well as his work with cranberry producers. In the collection are reports from the cranberry grower’s association, published articles by Franklin on cranberries and the Bombidae, and reports from the State Agricultural Board on cranberry production.

Alice Howell Friedman, a professor in the School of Nursing from 1967 until her retirement in 1984, was a strong advocate for the professionalization of nursing, and an activist for unionization and equitable compensation for nurses. Friedman arrived during a period of rapid growth for the School of Nursing and her push to broaden the educational content of nursing students played a significant role in the further growth and success of the program. This approach is exemplified in the International Experiences program she founded. After retirement, Friedman remained very involved in the field of nursing and, among many significant activities, focused on the history of nursing, becoming a tireless lay-archivist, forming the Nursing Archives at Boston University and developing the School of Nursing collections at UMass Amherst.

The Alice Howell Friedman papers document Friedman’s time as an Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing at UMass and her work as a labor activist, including lecture notes, publications, correspondence, clippings, and biographical materials.

Born in June 1922, Harvey Friedman attended Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and enrolled in the Boston University School of Law in 1941. After serving as a non-commissioned officer with an Army medical unit in France from 1942-1946, Friedman returned home to Massachusetts and became a member of the bar in 1948. For the next fifteen years, he was the Assistant New England Director for the Amalgamated Clothing Worker Union, AFL-CIO. After refusing the position several times, Friedman accepted an offer from the University of Massachusetts Amherst to become Assistant Director of the Labor Relations and Research Center in 1965, earning promotion to Director in 1970. During his tenure at UMass, Friedman taught classes in Political Science, Legal Studies, Government, and Education. He retired from UMass in 1990 and passed away in 1992.

The Friedman Papers contain correspondence, newsclippings, and course materials dating from Friedman’s time at UMass. Also included are materials related to unions with which Friedman worked and documentation of his relationship with the American Arbitration Association.

A professor of design in the Department of Art, Architecture, and Art History, Arnold Friedmann worked throughout his career to professionalize interior design and enhance the quality of daily life through good design. Born into a “gut Buergerlich” Jewish family in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1925, and raised in comfortable circumstances, Friedmann’s life was deflected by the political turmoil of the twentieth century. After Kristallnacht drove home the political realities of the Nazi era, Friedmann’s father used connections to secure permission for the family to emigrate to Palestine, where, impoverished and with his education disrupted, Arnold apprenticed to a cabinetmaker. Following service in the British army and later the Israeli army, Friedmann resumed his education, entering the Pratt Institute to study interior design. Earning both his bachelors and masters degrees (his doctorate from the Union Institute followed in 1976), Friedmann freelanced in interior design and furniture design while teaching at Pratt, eventually becoming chair of his Department. From 1972 until his retirement in 1990, Friedmann served as Professor of Design at UMass Amherst. A founding member of the Interior Design Educators Council, Friedmann was recognized within the profession as an honorary fellow of the Design Institute of Australia (1985) and as a recipient of the IKEA Award (1989).

The Friedmann Papers contain a wealth of unpublished and published writings by Friedmann on design, stemming primarily from his years at UMass Amherst. A small sheaf of photographs depicting his design work, and a series of Department of Interior Design newsletters from Pratt, 1963-1967.

Recruited to Massachusetts Agricultural College by Lyman Butterfield in 1912, George Edward Gage helped build several scientific departments at the college. Born in Springfield, Mass., on the last day of the year 1884, Gage received his doctorate at Yale in 1909, and served at various points as head of Animal Pathology, Veterinary Science, and Physiology and Bacteriology. He died unexpectedly in March 1948 at the age of 64.

A slender collection, the Gage papers contain seven offprints of Gage’s articles on poultry diseases (1912-1922) and an impressively thorough set of notes taken by MSC student Roy H. Moult in Gage’s Physiology 75 class, 1936-1937.

Corn sample, Herbarium of Walt C. Galinat, 1971

Born in 1923 in Manchester, Connecticut, Walton Clarence Galinat was a corn enthusiast for almost his entire life. He worked with various aspects of corn in high school, as an undergraduate student assistant at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, as a research associate at Harvard University, and finally, as a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he worked at the Waltham Field Station as a plant geneticist from 1964 until his retirement in 1990. A contributing author to more than 300 published papers, Galinat spent significant parts of his research career in Mexico studying ancient maize, but was also deeply embedded in New England farming and corn production and sustainability. In addition to his world-renowned research on corn evolution, morphology, and diversity, he is credited with the development of many varieties of corn, including Candy Stick, “airplane corn,” and a red, white, and blue kernel variety. His skill as an artist was also recognized across his field and beyond, with his articles often accompanied by beautifully detailed illustrations of corn samples, his widely distributed and used teaching illustrations, and with a few of his hand-drawn corn diagrams permanently displayed in the National Academies Building in Washington D.C. The Waltham Experiment Station building retains several of Galinat’s oversized 3D art models of corn plant migrations and lifecycles to this day. Amongst many honors, Galinat was awarded the prestigious Distinguished Economic Botanist Award from the Society for Economic Botany in 1994.

The Walton C. Galinat Papers document Galinat’s academic, service, research, and artistic work during his time at the Waltham Experiment Station while employed as a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Roughly half the collection is administrative and professional materials, including correspondence; research files and journals, with numerous detailed hand-drawn illustrations; Experiment Station and Hatch annual reports and grants; UMass administrative memos, reports, and files; and photographs of corn samples as well as individuals from Experiment Station, Home Economics, and 4H clubs. The other half of the collection consists of three-dimensional corn display samples and pressed corn and grass from Galinat’s personal herbarium.

Gretchen Gerzina, Paul Murray Kendall Chair in Biography and Professor of English at UMass Amherst, served as dean of Commonwealth Honors College for five years before joining the English department full-time. A native of Ann Arbor, Mich., who grew up in Springfield, Mass., Gerzina is the child of a white mother and Black father who, in her research and writing, has often engaged with issues of race and the lives of those affected by racial and other boundaries. She is known for her biographies, including those of Dora Carrington and Frances Hodgson Burnett; her work on Black Britain including Black England: A Forgotten Georgian History (a revised and reissued version of Black London: Life Before Emancipation); and the acclaimed Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Family Moved Out of Slavery and Into Legend. Gerzina hosted public radio’s nationally syndicated program “The Book Show,” interviewing many of contemporary literature’s notable figures, from 1997 to 2012, and a ten-part BBC radio series, “Britain’s Black Past,” which aired in 2016. She has also taught at Vassar, Barnard, and Dartmouth, where she was the first Black woman to chair an Ivy League English department.

The Gerzina Papers consist of materials relating to some of Gerzina’s research and published books and include notes, correspondence, draft manuscripts, and publication-related material, as well as approximately 400 recordings on CD of “The Book Show.” Additions to the collection are expected.