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A town at the eastern periphery of Franklin County, Mass., New Salem was incorporated in 1753 and has never strayed far from its rural roots. In the 1840s, agriculture supplied much of the town’s work, supplemented by lumbering, hide tanning, and a cottage industry in palm-leaf hats, of which over 79,000 were manufactured in 1837 alone.

Although this daybook covers only a brief span of four years, it offers a fascinating glimpse into the vibrancy of a country store in antebellum Western Massachusetts. The store’s owner is not recorded, however the names of dozens of men and women from New Salem appear as purchasers of small quantities of consumable goods and the occasional luxury items like peppermint and candy. The last several pages of the ledger include accounts for particularly active customers, including several who supplied the store with large numbers of palm-leaf hats, which the store’s owner may have exported, and records of receipt for various kinds of paper, almanacs, toy books, and textbooks in mathematics and spelling.

A chair-maker and Revolutionary War veteran, Daniel Smith lived on High Street in Ipswich, Mass. As early as 1774, Smith was bottoming and repairing chairs, and for several decades, he produced chairs of various sorts, including waist chairs, four-back chairs, “green chairs,” great chairs, round chairs, and low chairs. Smith died in Jan. 1844.

This rough, but noteworthy volume records nearly two and half decades of production by a Massachusetts chair maker in the early National period. The volume begins as a cipher book, apparently kept by Smith in his late teens, but by the earliest accounts in 1774, Smith records “bottoming and mending” chairs and, by 1785, making “six four back chairs & a grat chair” for Thomas Smith.

At the time of the American Civil War, Charles Sisson attended the Friends Boarding School in Providence, R.I. An active member of the Society of Friends, Sisson was apparently a dedicated student and avid member of the literary society. After graduation, he pursued an enormously successful career in the textile industry, becoming a founder of the Hope Webbing Company in 1883, one of the nation’s largest narrow-fabric manufacturers.

Kept by teenaged Charles Sisson, this diary includes regular entries describing a student’s daily life at the Friends Boarding School in Providence R.I. In addition to occasional details on coursework, Sisson describes his social activities in some depth, and often with some humor. With rare exceptions, the larger currents of the Civil War served as little more than a backdrop, although the future of liberated slaves appeared as a topic for debate at the Lyceum, and marching was taken up as an activity by the students.

A textile manufacturer, Ponakin (or Ponikin) Mill was established on the north branch of the Nashua River, half a mile from North Lancaster, in 1861, near the site of an earlier cotton mill. By the end of the Civil War, it boasted 40 employees who produced 500,000 yards of brown sheeting, but by the time it was incorporated in 1888, specializing in the production of cotton yarn, manufacturing in Lancaster was already on the decline. The company survived at least into the 1920s.

This survival from a central Massachusetts textile manufacturer contains miscellaneous business records copied into a letterpress (or wet press) copy book, in which a combination of moisture and pressure was used to transfer ink from the original onto a sheet of tissue paper. This records cover a wide terrain, including inventories of stock on hand, accounts payable, insurance and IRS tax information, payroll data (without names), shipping lists and lists of customers, and a few copies of business letters.

Judy Norsigian is a prominent advocate for women’s reproductive health and was a co-founder of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, better known by its later and the title of its best-known book, Our Bodies, Ourselves. Editor of each of the nine editions of the book and executive director of the collective from 2001 to 2015, Norsigian is an important public intellectual on women’s health issues and has served on numerous boards and advisory groups relating to reproductive health, contraception, and medical research.

Consisting primarily of the sort of ephemeral political literature that abounded in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Norsigian collection offers insight into the feminist movement and the early milieu of Our Bodies, Ourselves. Many of the publications are devoted to issues in contemporary feminism or pertain to women’s conferences, however several (especially those published by the New England Free Press) take on other political and social movements.

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

A leader in promoting energy sustainability, particularly in the building sector, the New England Sustainable Energy Association is a membership organization dedicated to advancing the adoption of sustainable energy practices in the built environment by cultivating a community where practitioners share, collaborate, and learn. Founded as the New England Solar Energy Association in 1974, NESEA merged with likeminded organizations, changing name (but not acronym) to the Northeast Solar Energy Association in 1985 and then to the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association in 1989. NESEA is an associate member of the American Solar Energy Society.

The records of a grassroots organization devoted to energy sustainability, this collection documents the origins and growth of solar energy, the construction industry, and ideas about sustainable living in New England.

The farmer Nathaniel Maynard was born in Marlborough (Worcester County), Mass., on Feb. 27, 1780, the eldest of four children of Joseph Maynard and Lovina Barnes. By 1804, when he married Rachel (Hill) of North Brookfield, Nathaniel was already a resident of Leverett, where he had apparently moved with his brother William. Nathaniel and Rachel had four children: Ira B. Maynard (1810-1896), Alvin (1813-1818), Emeline Dudley (1815-1901), and Joseph Bartlett Maynard (1817-1881).

This small volume is a hybrid production. Roughly the first half of the volume consists of relatively standard exercises for learning arithmetic and business activities, including calculating weights, measures, currencies, finances, and interest rates. The remainder consists of accounts, recording a variety of work performed by Maynard, ranging from farm labor (sale of potatoes, plowing and planting, working with oxen, slaughtering, and chopping wood) to weaving (“sheeting”) and especially mending or making shoes.

An educator and scholar of educational assessment, Monty Neil is the Executive Director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing (FairTest). For his doctorate at Harvard in the mid-1980s, Neill examined the impact of the 1974 desegregation order affecting Boston’s public schools and the ongoing search within the city’s African American community for quality and equity in education. He completed his dissertation, The Struggle of Boston’s Black Community for Quality and Equality in Education: 1960-1985, in 1987.

The 33 audiocassettes in this collection include interviews with 29 activists and educational and political leaders in Boston, predominantly from the city’s African American community, include in-depth discussions about the busing crisis in Boston during the late 1970s and early 1980s, its aftermath, and the ongoing search for educational equity and quality. The tapes were recorded between January and April 1986 as part of Neill’s dissertation research.

Founded in 1067, the Benedictine convent of San Pier Maggiore was an ecclesiastical center of medieval Florence, and socially one the city’s most prestigious religious houses for women. A Gothic church was completed at the convent in 1352, featuring an elaborate multi-paneled altarpiece by Jacopo di Cione. The convent remained active until its razing in 1784.

A utilitarian, but ritually significant work, this manuscript contains the text and music used in celebrating the consecration of nuns at the Benedictine convent of San Pier Maggiore. The acanthus border on the first folio suggests a mid-fourteenth century date of origin, though likely prior to the commissioning of Cione’s Coronation of the Virgin altarpiece.

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

Yasuko Fukumi graduated from Tsuda College in Tokyo in 1949 with a B.A. in English. From 1949 to 1952, she worked in the library of the Narimasu High and Junior High Schools, before becoming an Assistant Librarian at the American School in Japan. In 1962, Fukumi moved to the United States to pursue a graduate degree in library science at Kansas State Teachers College. She held two positions at other American libraries before joining the staff of the UMass Amherst Library as a cataloger and later as the East Asian Studies Librarian. Fukumi first discovered the Benjamin Smith Lyman Collection, housed then at the Forbes Library in Northampton, in 1979. From that time forward, she worked tirelessly to bring the collection to the attention of the faculty at UMass and to the scholarly world at large. In 1987, she mounted a campaign to raise the $200,000 necessary to purchase the collection from the Forbes Library and secure it a permanent home in the UMass Amherst Special Collection and University Archives.

Fukumi’s papers focus on her extensive research both on Benjamin Smith Lyman and on the Japanese books that comprised his collection, books now housed along with his papers at UMass Amherst. Materials include Lyman family history and genealogy, Lyman’s contributions to Japan’s coal, oil, and mineral reserves during the latter of the 19th century, and Fukumi’s bibliography of Lyman’s library. The collection also contains limited material on Fukumi’s employment at the university library and a large selection of her Haiku poems.