Collections: arx

Business courses were first offered at the Massachusetts Agricultural College in the early years of the twentieth century, expanding rapidly during the 1930s and 1940s in response to student demand. The Board of Trustees established the School of Business Administration in 1947, and within seven years, it was conferring graduate degrees, including doctorates after 1967. In 1998, the School was renamed the Eugene M. Isenberg School of Management.

The record group consists of annual reports, deans’ records, correspondence, committee reports, long-range planning, self-study reports, proposals, research reports, faculty reprint series, lists of faculty publications, general publications, brochures, seminar information, newsletters, newsclippings and other related materials.

The European Field Studies Program has played a critical role in graduate and undergradute training in the UMass Amherst Department of Anthropology since its inception in the late 1960s. The program provides opportunities for graduate students and honors undergraduates to gain practical experience in fieldwork by taking part in intensive projects at selected sites in Europe. The program is designed to assist students in developing concrete research plans and to begin to put their plans into effect.

The EFS collection contains correspondence between faculty and students about fieldwork, student research proposals and final reports, publications and data on the distinguished lecturers, departmental memos and meeting minutes, and range of other miscellaneous and financial material.

Cheryl Evans singing at Medford High School, ca. 1962

A lifelong activist, performer, and educator, Cheryl Lorraine Evans was born in 1946 in west Medford, MA, the eldest of five. As a high school student, Evans attended the march on Washington in 1963, and was then the first in her family to attend college, in 1964 joining the largest class at UMass Amherst to date. She graduated four years later as a pivotal organizer of African American students across campus, the Five Colleges, and in the region – during the period when Black student groups, the Black Cultural Center, and the Black Studies department all had their origins at UMass. Evans was the first elected president of an African American student organization at UMass, and remains an organizer to this day, particularly as a key connector for Black alumni and through her UMass Black Pioneers Project.

Evans went on to work at UMass as an assistant area coordinator of Orchard Hill, an area housing the majority of the students of color and CCEBS students on campus at the time, and then for the Urban University Program at Rutgers University. She worked for over a decade in early childhood education, mostly in New Jersey and New York City, then while working for the State of Massachusetts received her MA in Communication from Emerson College, partially to help her public radio show, “Black Family Experience.” Evans was the first African American woman to run for City Council in Medford, and was appointed to the Massachusetts Area Planning Council by Governor Dukakis. She taught for five years at Northshore Community College, received her PhD from Old Dominion University in 1997, and ended her career at Bloomfield College, where she was a professor for 18 years until her retirement in 2016. A prolific singer as a child and young adult, Evans was, and continues to be, a performance artist, with several theater pieces focused on Black history, all in addition to her outreach, organizing, and workshops, many focused on increasing the number of Black graduate and doctoral students.

The Cheryl Evans Papers document over 60 years of the life of the educator and activist, including childhood report cards and essays, clippings from the civil rights movement she followed and joined as a high school student, undergraduate records and ephemera, documentation of Black UMass alumni events, and records from her careers in public advocacy, education, and the theater. Evan’s time at UMass is especially well documented, including schoolwork, numerous photographs of student life on campus, social and political organization records, including contact lists of and correspondence with Black students, and the original protest demands from the 1970 Mills House protest and march to Whitmore.

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

Born on a farm in Hungary in 1932, the landscape architect Julius Fabos survived the Second World War and the onset of Stalinism before escaping to America during the Revolution of 1956. Able to resume his studies, Fabos received his BS in plant science from Rutgers (1961) and MLA from Harvard (1964), joining the faculty at UMass Amherst shortly thereafter while continuing toward a doctorate in Resource Planning and Conservation at the University of Michigan (1973). A charismatic teacher and prolific writer, Fabos is noted internationally for his work on landscape assessment and planning and greenways. In the early 1970s, he helped establish the METLAND (Metropolitan Landscape Planning) interdisciplinary research group, which pioneered the use of GIS technology in landscape planning. Fabos has received numerous honors in his career, including recognition as a Fellow of American Society of Landscape Architects (1985), as a Medalist for the ASLA (1997), and recipient of an honorary degree from the Hungarian University of Horticulture. Fabos retired in 1997.

The Fabos papers contain a record of a distinguished career in landscape architecture, including Fabos’ numerous publications, grey literature, conference materials, notes, and selected correspondence.

Logo of the Funeral Consumers Alliance

Funerals in the U.S. are an expensive business, and grieving families will often accept what is called “traditional” rather than try to fight for services tailored to their budgets and beliefs. The first memorial societies were founded to combat the often predatory practices of the funeral industry after embalming prices skyrocketed in the 1930s, but the movement didn’t fully catch on until 1958 when investigative journalist Jessica Mitford brought the issue to greater public attention. Her article “Saint Peter Don’t Call On Me,” television appearances, and subsequent book “The American Way of Death” broke taboos surrounding the discussion of burial and sparked the founding of watchdog and consumer advocacy organizations across the country. The Funeral Consumers Alliance of Western Mass (FCAWM), initially known as the Springfield Memorial Society, was founded in 1959, incorporated in March 1962, and by 1963 had federated with other similar organizations to create the Continental Association of Funeral and Memorial Societies (CAFMS). When Canadian groups separated from CAFMS, the federation name changed to Funeral and Memorial Societies of America (FAMSA), and later (2000) the Funeral Consumers Alliance (FCA).

The bulk of the FCAWM records contain organizational records such as correspondence, minutes and agendas for public and private meetings, and financial records. There is also a selection of informational pamphlets and leaflets generated by the FCAWM, other FCAs, and the funeral industry. Additionally, there are several pages from a set of scrapbooks maintained by former members between 1964 and 1978 which contain newspaper and magazine clippings on death, dying, and the funeral industry at large. The collection was acquired from Sandra Ward in 2021, a board member and former president of the FCAWM, and includes material collected both by herself and previous presidents.

See also:
Memorial Society of New Hampshire Records

The son of a missionary based in Constantinople, Henry Hill Goodell was born on May 20, 1839. After graduating from Amherst College in 1862, Goodell saw Civil War service with the 25th Connecticut Infantry in the Department of the Gulf, returning to New England to accept a position as Professor of Modern Languages at the newly-formed Massachusetts Agricultural College when it opened in 1867. Over the next four decades, Goodell taught a wide range of subjects, including military tactics, natural science, and elocution, and became its first librarian, before becoming President of the College from 1886 to 1905. As President, Goodell oversaw remarkable changes, including the admission of the first women and African American students, the first offering of electives in the curriculum, the development of the Experiment Station, and Extension Services, and the awarding of the first graduate degrees. Goodell died in April 1905.

The Goodell papers are a faint reflection of one of the key figures in the history of Massachusetts Agricultural College. The bulk of the collection consists of lectures given by Goodell in courses he offered at MAC, however there are a handful of items from his student days at Amherst College, his Civil War service, and a few items relating to the period of his presidency.

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

The economic geographer Julie Graham (1945-2010) and her colleague Katherine Gibson have been influential in envisioning alternatives to capitalist economics and economic development. After studying at Smith College (BA, 1965) and Clark University (PhD, 1984), Graham joined the faculty at UMass Amherst where she helped shape the new graduate program in geography. From early in her career, she worked so closely with her Australian colleague Gibson that they often published jointly under the pen name J.K. Gibson-Graham, and Graham developed close working relationships across several departments at UMass. A prolific author and inspiring mentor for students, Graham’s academic work drew upon an innovative mix of political economy, poststructuralist theory, feminism, and community-based research. Among her more significant publications are the now-classic The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (1996), on representations of capitalism and their political effect, A Postcapitalist Politics (2006), which explores alternatives to capitalism, and two edited volumes, Class and Its Others (2000) and Re/Presenting Class (2001). Graham died in Nashville on April 4, 2010.

The Graham Papers offer a detailed perspective on the radical geographer Julie Graham. The collections documents Graham’s life and career beginning in her undergraduate years and extending through her last research projects in community economies. Through correspondence and writings, photographs, and research — closely intertwined with her colleague Katherine Gibson — the collection gives shape of Graham’s radical challenge to human geography tinged with an optimistic economic and social possibility. The collection also includes letters, photographs, and genealogical matter relating to Graham’s family, extending back to the time of the First World War.

A specialist in higher education and comparative politics in the developing world, Fred Hayward earned a doctorate in Politics at Princeton in 1968 for his research on political organizations in West Africa. Following a 24 year career at the University of Wisconsin (1967-1991), where he became Dean of International Studies and Programs, Hayward has worked as a Senior Associate to the American Council on Education, a consultant to the World Bank, and since 2009, as a Senior Higher Education Consultant with UMass Amherst. Having worked in fifteen countries with ministries, universities, and NGOs, his scholarship runs the gamut from African politics to higher education in Afghanistan.

The papers document some of Fred Hayward’s activities, centered in Africa and Afghanistan. The bulk of the collection stems from his work in Sierra Leone during the 1960s through 1980s, in Ethiopia (2003), and it includes noteworthy material on a World Bank-funded project to support strategic planning for six Afghan Universities as well as a feasibility study on private section involvement in Afghan higher education.

A particle physicist educated at Johns Hopkins (PhD, 1965), Stanley S. Hertzbach joined the Physics faculty at UMass Amherst in 1965. Over the course of his career, he took part in high-energy experimental work at Brookhaven National Laboratory, the CERN hadron collider, the Cornell electron synchrotron, and beginning in 1979, at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center). With his colleague Richard Koffler, Hertzbach joined the SLD collaboration at SLAC in 1986 studying Z particles, and the BaBar (B Meson) group in 1994. A major contributor to the SLD “beamline group,” Hertzbach took part in the BaBar calorimeter beam test and in testing of its calorimeter modules. He was an active member of the SLD advisory group and chaired the SLAC Users Organization (SLUO) in the 1990s. Hertzbach’s contributions to UMass included service on several committees relating to student achievement, including a stint as Undergraduate Advising Dean of the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. Hertzbach retired from UMass in 2009.

The Hertzbach collection consists of two distinct parts: six laboratory notebooks kept while conducting research at SLAC (1987-2002), and approximately 0.5 linear feet of records from university committees on which Hertzbach sat (e.g. the Space and Calendar, 1977-1983).

Beginning with his dissertation in theoretical astrophysics “Local irregularities in a universe satisfying the cosmological principle” (Harvard, 1961), William M. Irvine enjoyed a distinguished career as an astronomer and a role as one of the primary figures in developing astronomy at the Five Colleges. Arriving at UMass in 1966, Irvine helped build the graduate program in astronomy and beginning in 1969, he was a motive force in establishing the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory. Focused largely on the chemistry of dense interstellar clouds and the physics and chemistry of comets, and with a broad interest in bioastronomy/astrobiology, Irvine has been a prolific contributor to his field, and has served as President of the Commission on Bioastronomy at the International Astronomical Union, Chair of the Division for Planetary Sciences at the American Astronomical Society, a Councillor of the International Society for the Study of the origin of Life, and a member of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The Irvine Papers offer a thorough record of the establishment of the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory from 1969 through its dedication in Oct. 1976, along with insights into the growth of astronomy at UMass and the Five College Astronomy Department. Correspondence, memoranda, grant applications, and many dozens of photographs offer insight into the financial and political challenges of building the Observatory in the Quabbin watershed. The collection also includes notes for teaching Astronomy 101 and 223 (planetary science). His history of the department, Reflections on the Growth of Astronomy at the University of Massachusetts and the Five College Astronomy Department (2006), is filed with the Physics and Astronomy Department records and a copy is included in this collection. Irvine’s published works are listed in the Libraries’ ScholarWorks author gallery.