Collecting area: UMass (1947- )

Over the course of his esteemed dance career, Richard Jones performed with Eleo Pomare Company, the Miguel Godreau Dance Company, and the Xochipillian Dance Group. Jones was appointed to the staff of the University of Massachusetts on September 1, 1973, and remained with the department until his death in 1991. While at the University, Jones was the founding artistic director of the Amdans Theater, and was the artistic director of the University Dancers from 1979 to 1991.

The Jones Papers are a collection of photographs and reviews of Jones’s choreography during the 1970s and 1980s. A copy of Jones’s original essay, “Costuming for Three Styles of Dance,” (circa 1975) appears in the collection, as do photographs, playbills, posters, Amdans Theatre and University Dancers reviews. The Papers also contain letters to Jones from the Boston Ballet and the American College Dance Festival, as well as reviews of Jones’s choreography for professional companies outside the University.

A poet, expert on the works of Ernest Hemingway, Robert Francis, and D.H. Lawrence, and a 1953 graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Donald Junkins directed the Master of Fine Arts in English program from 1966. Junkins juggled his career as a poet with his work at the University, focusing his teaching energy on literature, not creative writing, to save his creative resources. Before turning to poetry, Junkins studied theology at Boston University School of Theology. Through meeting poet Robert Francis and taking courses with Robert Lowell, Junkins discovered his love of poetry, and his life path was forever changed. After leaving Boston University, Junkins taught creative writing at Chico State University before returning to UMass to teach.

The Donald Junkins Papers document his youth in Saugus, Mass., his experiences as a student at UMass, and his professional and creative life. The collection includes correspondence with his family throughout his life, photographs documenting his family in Eastern Mass., his records as head of the MFA in English program, and his personal and professional correspondence.

Access restrictions: Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA in advance to request materials from this collection.

An eminent scholar of African American history and activist, Sidney Kaplan was raised in New York City and graduated from City College in 1942. After wartime service as a Lieutenant in the Army, Kaplan returned to his education, completing an MA in history from Boston University (1948) and PhD at Harvard (1960), taking up the study of African American history at a time when few white scholars showed interest. Joining the English Department at UMass in 1946, Kaplan’s influence was widely felt at UMass Amherst and in the local community: he was among the founders of the Department of Afro-American Studies, a founder of the UMass Press, a founder and editor of the Massachusetts Review, and he was the editor of Leonard Baskin’s Gehenna Press. Over more than thirty years at UMass, he worked on diverse projects in history, literature, and the arts, often in partnership with his wife Emma Nogrady, a librarian at Smith College whom he married in 1933, ranging from studies of Poe and Melville to a biographical dictionary of African Americans and a study of Shays’ Rebellion. In 1973, they were co-authors of the first comprehensive study of depictions of African Americans in the visual arts, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution (based on an exhibition planned for the National Portrait Gallery), and in 1991, the UMass Press published a collection of Sidney’s essays, American Studies in Black and White. A Fulbright lecturer in Greece and Yugoslavia and exchange Professor at the University of Kent, Kaplan was the recipient of the Bancroft Award from the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History for best article of the year in the Journal of Negro History, and he was awarded the UMass Amherst Chancellor’s Medal in 1979, one year after his retirement. Sidney Kaplan died in 1993 at age 80 and was followed by Emma in 2010.

The Kaplan Papers document a long career devoted to the study of African American history and life. The extensive correspondence, research notes, and drafts of articles and other materials offer important insight into the growth of African American studies from the 1950s through 1970s as well as the growth of UMass Amherst into a major research university.

Born in Syracuse, New York, in 1927, David C. Knapp studied at Syracuse University (BA, 1947) and the University of Chicago (M.A., 1948; PhD, 1953)., before joining the faculty in government at the University of New Hampshire. Recognized as an able administrator from early in his career, Knapp was appointed assistant to the university president and then Dean of the College of Liberal Arts (1961-1962). Leaving UNH in 1963, he served successively as associate director of the Study of American Colleges of Agriculture, director of the Institute of College and University Administrators of the American Council on Education, and Dean of the New York State College of Human Ecology at Cornell University (1968-1974) before being elected president of the University of Massachusetts in 1978. He retired in 1990.

The Knapp Papers consist primarily of materials relating to efforts in the early 1990s to designate Hokkaido and Massachusetts as sister states, to celebrate the long relationship Between UMass and the University of Hokkaido, and to commemorate the legacy of Benjamin Smith Lyman. In addition to correspondence with the Massachusetts Hokkaido Society and Hokkaido University, the collection includes memorabilia associated with Knapp’s connections with Japan.

Joseph Langland with his wife, Judith

The poet Joseph Langland was raised on the family farm in northeastern Iowa, and earned both a BA (1940) and MA (1941) from the famed writing program at the University of Iowa, before being inducted into the military service during the Second World War. While still in Germany serving with the Allied military government, Langland had printed for his family his first book of poetry, a chapbook titled For Harold (1945), for his younger brother who had been killed in action in the Philippines. Returning home, he taught part-time at Iowa, then joined the faculty at the University of Wyoming (1948-1959), and finally UMass Amherst. Part of a wave of energetic young writers and scholars to arrive on campus, Langland became active in the early years of the Massachusetts Review and became founder the university’s MFA Program for Poets and Writers. A prolific writer, he contributed regularly to literary magazines and was author of The Green Town (1956), The Wheel of Summer (1963), The Sacrifice Poems (1975), Any Body’s Song (1980), and Selected Poems (1991). Langland was recipient of the National Council of the Arts Award, the Melville Cane Award, the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Fellowship, and a Ford Faculty Fellowship, among other honors. After his retirement from UMass in 1979, he served as emeritus until his death in 2007.

The Langland Papers include a substantial number of original manuscripts of poetry, many unpublished, correspondence with major poets, and an extensive run of Langland’s letters written home to his wife and family during the war. Other Langland Papers are housed at Luther College in Iowa.

A talented musician and member of the UMass Amherst faculty in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Henry A. Lea was born Heinz Liachowsky in Berlin in 1920. With the rise of the Nazi Party, the Jewish Liachowskys left their home for the United States, settling in Philadelphia and simplifying the family name to Lea. Henry studied French as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania (1942) but shortly after graduation, he began his military service. After training in Alabama and in the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) program at Ohio State, he was assinged to duty interrogating prisoners of war with the G2 (intelligence) section of the First U.S. Army; he later served as a translator at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials in 1947-1948 and for the military government in Frankfurt (1948-1949). Lea returned to his alma mater for a masters degree in German (1951), and accepted a position teaching at UMass in the following year. In 1962, he received a doctorate for a dissertation under Adolf Klarmann on the Austrian expatriate writer Franz Werfel. During his tenure at the university he published extensively on Werfel, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, and Gustav Mahler, including a book on the composer and conductor entitled Gustav Mahler: Man on the Margin. Lea remained at UMass until his retirement in 1985.

The Lea Papers consist chiefly of two types of material: research notes and correspondence. The nearly 200 letters written by Henry A. Lea during his military service in the Second World War provide an excellent account, albeit a self-censored account, of his experience from training through deployment and return. Lea’s research notes include notebooks on Werfel and files on Mahler and Hildesheimer. Other items include a pre-war album containing commercial photographs collected during a vacation and a baby book from an American family living in occupation-era Germany.

An accomplished concert pianist and composer, Howard Miles Lebow earned both a BA and MFA at the at the Julliard School of Music. Under the tutelage of Edward Steuermann, a pupil of composer Ferruccio Busoni, Lebow exceled as a pianist, performing throughout Europe and the Americas. Joining the rapidly expanding Music faculty at the University of Massachusetts in September 1965, Lebow mixed lecturing and performing until 1968, when he died in an automobile crash at the age of 32. The Howard M. Lebow Scholarship Fund was established in his name in 1968.

The Lebow Collection contains concert programs of many of Lebow’s performances, copy manuscripts, manuscripts of his own compositions, performance notes, and newspapers clippings about and concert programs of other performers. There are also materials that were interleaved within his extensive sheet music collection, now separated and organized by composition. An extensive collection of sheet music has been added to the Libraries’ general collections.

A graduate of the University of Massachusetts’ Social Thought and Political Economy program in 1981, Karen Lederer has held many important roles in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies since she started in 1986, including, Undergraduate Advisor and Undergraduate Field Work Coordinator, and has taught courses women’s careers and life choices. In addition to her work at the University, Lederer has been an activist for peace, labor, and women’s movements.

This small collection consists of departmental administrative files, Lederer’s course materials, several issues of New Roots magazine and other publications, and memorabilia from the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

John Lederle played a large role in shaping the Amherst campus as it looks today, transforming UMass Amherst into a nationally respected research university and “great public center for excellence in higher education.” Born in Royal Oak, Michigan, Lederle received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1942. Admitted to the Michigan Bar in 1936, he worked with a Detroit law firm from 1936 to 1940 before joining the political science department at Brown University from 1941 to 1944. He returned to the University of Michigan in 1944, filling a number of positions until 1960, when the University of Massachusetts elected him President. Under Lederle’s leadership, the Amherst campus enjoyed its greatest period of growth. From 1960 to 1970, student enrollment more than tripled and faculty salaries nearly doubled. The academic program expanded greatly, particularly at the graduate level, and under his watch, the university instituted an academic press, a public radio station, and collaborative arrangements between the local colleges. The University system also evolved in the Lederle years, with the establishment of the Boston campus in 1964 and the medical school in Worcester in 1962.

The Lederle Papers include professional correspondence, administrative records, subject files, committee notes, reports, and clippings; Extra-University records that document Lederle’s involvement and interactions with governmental and non-governmental organizations at the state, regional, and national levels; personal correspondence, speeches, bibliographies of his writings, biographical information, a transcript of an oral history describing his administration, and materials relating to his professional activities that followed his presidency; and a series of confidential records.

An authority in the field of low-temperature physics and superconductivity, Ernest A. Lynton was brought to UMass Amherst in 1973 to serve as the first Vice President for Academic Affairs and Commonwealth Professor of Physics. Lynton was charged with diversifying the student body and broadening the curriculum to emphasize social issues. Born in Berlin Germany in 1926, Lynton received a doctorate in physics from Yale in 1951. He served in his administrative post until 1980, when he took a position as Commonwealth Professor at UMass Boston.

Centered largely on Ernest Lynton’s teaching, the collection contains lecture notes and handouts for Physics courses (Physics 107, 171, Concepts in Physics, Thermodynamics, Statistical Physics), a copy of his dissertation Second Sound in He3-He 4 mixtures, and copies of his book on superconductivity in English, German, and French editions.