Collecting area: UMass students

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.

The once active photo morgue of the Alumnus Magazine, the Alumnus Magazine Photograph Collection captures diverse aspects of campus life during the 1970s and 1980s, including portraits of campus officials, sports events, commencements, a visit to campus by Julius Erving, and assorted campus buildings and scenery.

Born in Groton, Massachusetts. In 1930, Mary Taylor became a student of botany at Massachusetts State College in 1930. While there, she struck up a romance with Professor Ellsworth “Dutchie” Barnard, and the two were married on December 31, 1936. The Barnards served on the University Millennium Time Capsule Committee and contributed memorabilia to the capsule. Both were Friends of the Library and for many years, Ellsworth served on the library’s Board of Trustees.

The Mary Taylor Barnard Papers include notes from Barnard’s Botany classes, newsclippings about the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and documents related to the Friends of the W.E.B. Du Bois Library.

A screenwriter and visual artist, Tom Benedek majored in film as an undergraduate at UMass Amherst, earning the distinction of becoming the first graduate of the Bachelor’s Degree with Individual Concentration program in 1971. From early in his college career, Benedek worked as a photographer the newspaper, the Collegian, while studying with faculty such as Jerome Liebling (at Hampshire College) and Jerrold Maddox (at Amherst), and he spent his junior year in Paris studying at the Ecole du Louvre and l’Institut de Formation Cinematographique. In his career in Hollywood, he has written screenplays for the movies Cocoon, Zeus and Roxanne, and The Adventures of Pinocchio and worked with Robert Zemeckis, Lawrence Kasdan, Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese, Sydney Pollack, Richard Rush, and Harold Ramis, among many others. He is a member of the Writers Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and teaches screenwriting at the University of Southern California and the University of Michigan.

The hundreds of images in the Benedek Collection document the development of a talented photographer. While some of the images stem from his work for the Collegian, most were taken on his own around campus and beyond, including trips to Boston and New Orleans, and his year studying abroad in Paris following shortly after the events of 1968. The collection consists entirely of 35mm black and white negatives and color slides.

The Black Mass Communications Project was founded as an educational and informational outlet for Black students at UMass Amherst in October of 1970 and authorized in the following year as a Registered Student Organization. Over the years, BCMP played various roles on campus, including hosting cultural events, lectures, workshops, and social gatherings. Many of its early members were also affiliated with the student radio station WMUA, and throughout the 1970s, the organization played a prominent role in providing programming to the station highlighting African American music and current affairs.

The BCMP collection consists of ~500 reel to reel audiotapes of radio broadcasts aired over WFCR and WMUA during the 1970s and early 1980s by and for the university’s African American community. Included is a range of locally-produced public affairs, cultural, and music programming, with some content licensed from around the country. A few of the tapes are associated with the Five College’s National Public Radio affiliate, WFCR.

A member of of QTV fraternity, Charles Meade Boardman graduated from the Massachusetts Agricultural College in 1920 with a degree in landscape gardening.

Boardman’s Papers include two of his college yearbooks, a smattering of correspondence from the 1920s relating to landscape gardening, and approximately 30 photographs, apparently taken during or shortly after his time at MAC.

The Cannabis Reform Coalition at UMass Amherst was founded in 1991 and is considered the oldest student-run organization devoted to ending the prohibition on marijuana both locally and nationally and advocating for its industrial, medicinal, and recreational use for moral, environmental, and economic reasons. The CRC is one of the more active student organizations on campus and among other events, it sponsors the annual Extravaganja in April, which has attracted as many as 10,000 participants.

The CRC collection contains an assortment of fliers, posters, ephemera, and photographs, documenting the organization’s activities and activism, along with a small number of published and unpublished essays on the utility of hemp and cannbis products.

Daria Casinelli (left) with Beatrix Hoffman at a campus protest.

The Daria Casinelli Papers provide a lens into UMass student life in the 1980s via their creator and collector, Daria Casinelli, as well as documentation of her life after UMass in Chicago, Illinois and Waltham, Massachusetts. The papers consist largely of vast correspondence between Daria and her friends during her time at UMass as a student in the Social Thought and Political Economy (STPEC) program, including letters from Berkeley, California when she spent extended periods of time doing political organizing and activism. It contains photographs and records of her early life in Framingham, Massachusetts, including several family photographs that date to the 1940s. Throughout her time at UMass and beyond, Daria kept scrapbooks of photographs, ephemera, and original artwork documenting her life as a student and political activist, as well as collected published materials documenting Occupy Boston, abortion and reproductive rights, women’s rights, shelter work and homelessness, Apartheid in South Africa, Central America and the CIA, and related student activism.

Biographical sketch provided by Daria Casinelli: “My fractured family was part of white flight from Boston to ‘Framingburg’ in the 1970s. In the 1980s the death that moved that relocation along collided with my political awakening at UMass, Amherst. There I learned about the social reproduction of labor: no mother, no labor, reproduction, meh. Today, those realizations underlay my novel, ‘Occupy Shrugged’, forthcoming.

So, me and my sister grew up in the suburbs, without our mother and with only the physical presence of our father. We lived in one of the first cheap condominium complexes. Bishop Gardens opened about a mile from the railroad tracks at a time when manufacturing had just begun to transmogrify into retail, specifically a mile away in the other direction, at one of the first malls in the country, Shoppers World, Framingham. As a teenager I walked there and to the dusty downtown, once just Jewish, Italian American and Irish American, but at the time of this writing, very Brazilian. We were decidedly low-income and the lack of parenting made that worse. After freshmen year at George Washington University, I settled in happily at UMass, Amherst. There I sought out a major that would tell me: Why are people poor?

I loved Social Thought and Political Economy. It set me up for a career as a grant writer, occasional political activist and amatear philosopher, which in turn, led me to become a Buddhist, Taoist, Georgist, Socialist, Acupuncturist who dabbles in astrology. My first foray into Buddhistm was at a Japanese Pure Land Temple in Chicago. Great food, heart wrenching niche of artifacts from the US internment camps. After some seeking, I found the Insight Meditation Society, which influences me to this day. But then in my 60’s I realized I had never stopped believing in some kind of Spirit God, something good that animates the universe, so I became a Quaker. Since the day a Quaker taught me the foundations of non-violence during a civil disobedience training at UMass, I had always said that the Quakers and the Catholic Workers were the most ethical people I had ever met. Their lives follow their values unerringly. I dated a Catholic Worker, in Chicago in the 1990s: David Stein, the artist. I became a member of Friends Meeting Cambridge, MA, this year, 2025.”

Daria Casinelli was a close friend to Beatrix Hoffman, another UMass graduate whose collection is housed at the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center (SCUA) at UMass Amherst. The Daria Casinelli papers were processed by UMass student Yuni Gerzon, with some additional unprocessed accruals, and an inventory is available upon request.

The collection contains Super 8 film footage that SCUA does not currently have the ability to digitize.

The entomologist Charles F. Clagg was born in Barnstable, Mass., in 1904 and received his bachelor of science degree from the Massachusetts Agricultural College in 1927. Although never able to complete his graduate degree, Clagg enjoyed a long and productive career in entomology. Listed as a graduate student at MAC in 1929-1930, Clagg took part in an extensive collecting trip to the Philippines in 1930 and 1931. Beginning in June 1930 near Calian in Davao del Sur (Mindanao), Clagg spent several months collecting flies in and around the active Mount Apo volcano, in the Lawa and Calian river valleys, and in the Lalun mountains, traveling to the eastern peninsula of Davao early in 1931. He remained in the Pacific region later in his career, working as an entomologist for the U.S. Navy.

The twenty photographs taken by Charles F. Clagg in 1930 document his entomological collecting trip to Davao, Mindanao, in the Philippines. Primarily personal in nature, rather than professional, they were taken on Clagg’s visit to a coconut plantation run by American expatriates Henry and George Pahl and illustrate the local sights in Davao, including work in harvesting coconuts and the production of copra, the production of Manilla hemp, a horse fight at Calian, and Manobos who came to the plantation trade. Also included are three photographs of Clagg’s quarters while collecting high in the Lalun Mountains. The captions provided by Clagg on the back of each photograph have been transcribed verbatim.

Born on Jan. 4, 1863, and raised in Montague, Mass., Charles Wellington Clapp entered Massachusetts Agricultural College as a freshman during the fall 1882. Shouldering the standard coursework in agriculture and engineering, Clapp graduated with the class of 1886 and went on to a career as a civil engineer in Greenfield, Mass.

Written by Clapp to family members, mostly his sister Mary, during his undergraduate years at MAC, the 31 letters in this collection provide a lighthearted and engaging glimpse into the academic work and extra-curricular activities of a typical early student at Mass Aggie. Noteworthy among these letters are early references to football being played at the college and an effective hand-drawn map of campus, both from 1882.