Collections: arx

The composer Robert Stern was Professor of Theory and Composition in the Department of Music at UMass Amherst from 1964 until his retirement in 2006. A native of Paterson, N.J., Stern studied at the University of Rochester and the Eastman School of Music before arriving in Amherst. Noted for his use of Jewish themes and subjects, he has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.

The Stern collection includes six reel to reel audiotapes of performances of Stern’s work at UMass Amherst. These include music of Blood and Milk Songs (1975), music of Burrill Phillips (1975), the New Music Ensemble (1976), and the Pro Musica Moderna concerts (1979, 1980, and 1981).

Steve Alves is a western Massachusetts-based documentary filmmaker who, through his company Hometown Productions, later Home Planet Pictures, has written, produced, and directed several documentaries that examine New England’s natural and cultural history. Alves’ films, Beneath the River (1999), A Sweet Tradition (1999), Together in Time (2001), Everyone’s Business (1997), Life After High School (1990) and Talking to the Wall (2003) look at inter-generational ties and the role of community in American life and the tensions between tradition and modern capitalism at the dawn of the 21st century. His films examine a range of topics including local business, sprawl development, work, the Connecticut river, contra dance, and maple syrup and incorporate an array of storytelling techniques including animation, film clips, and dramatic vignettes. His 2014 film, Food for Change focuses on food co-ops as a force for dynamic social and economic change in American culture. His films have won numerous awards and honors from a host of entities including the Chicago International Film Festival, International Family Film Festival, the United Nations, and more.

Alves began his career as a filmmaker in the early 1970s as a student at the University of Southern California Film School where he made several documentary and experimental student films on 8 and 16mm in and around Los Angeles. Following graduation, he worked in Hollywood and New York City as a film editor on such films as Dancing’s All of You (1980), Sacred Hearts (1981), Ski New Hampshire (1981), The Garden of Eden (1984 Academy Award® nominee), Niagara Falls (1984), and The Adirondacks (1987). He moved to western Massachusetts in 1988 and formed his own film company, Home Planet Pictures. He has also produced several educational films and award-winning television commercials.

Alves’ collection documents the 50 year career of a working independent filmmaker. It includes all of the elements for most of his films which include outtakes, b-roll, and full interviews for all of his documentary films; from his earliest film Life After High School to Food for Change, his most recent. The collection covers a wide range of film and video formats including ¾” U-Matic, Betacam SP, S-VHS, Mini-DV, DVD, Super 8mm and 16mm. Also included are screenplays, correspondence, transcripts, interview releases, funding proposals, financial records, production documents, posters, and photographs related to the filming, production, release, and screening of all of his films. An inventory of the collection is available upon request.

A native of Boston and graduate of Boston Latin School and Harvard, Bill Strickland was a scholar, activist, and longtime member of the Department of Afro-American Studies at UMass Amherst. After fulfilling his service with the Marine Corps, Strickland became active in civil rights and Black liberation work, serving as Executive Director of the Northern Student Movement, working in Mississippi for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and then as Northern Coordinator of the Party’s Congressional Challenge. He was a founding member of Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity in 1964 and in 1969, was also a founding member of the Institute of the Black World in Atlanta. An exacting scholar, Strickland was a key member of the faculty in Afro-American Studies at UMass Amherst teaching history and politics and held a number of important roles, including acting as Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. He retired in 2013.

The Strickland Papers contain materials from two of Strickland’s many commitments during his time at UMass: the presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow People’s Party in 1988 and an initiative to commemorate the complex life and legacy of Jackie Robinson in 1996-1997. Additional materials for Strickland are included in the records of the Department of Afro-American Studies.

A leading researcher on communication and social behavior in termites, Alastair MacDonald Stuart (1931-2009) was born in Glasgow, Scotland in Jan. 4, 1931. After study at Glasgow University and the University of Auckland, he entered Harvard to study entomology under E.O. Wilson, completing his dissertation, Experimental Studies on Communication in Termites, in 1960. Among the early students of the role of pheromones in termite communication, Stuart held appointments at North Carolina State and Chicago before joining the faculty of the Department of Biology in 1970, where he remained until his retirement in 2004.

The Stuart Papers document the career of the entomologist, Alastair Stuart, from his days as a graduate student at Harvard through his long tenure at UMass Amherst. The collection includes a full range of correspondence, manuscripts, and research notes, with some documentation of his teaching responsibilities.

Born in Sacramento, Calif., but raised in Colorado, the biological anthropologist Alan C. Swedlund received each of his degrees at the University of Colorado Boulder (PhD, 1970). After a brief stint at Prescott College, Swedlund joined the faculty at UMass Amherst in 1973, where he helped to develop the doctoral program in biological anthropology and chaired the department for five years in the early 1990s. A prolific scholar, he drew upon diverse methodologies drawn from demography, epidemiology, and physical anthropology to explore interactions between cultural processes and human biological conditions in populations ranging from the Ancient Pueblo of the southwestern United States, to contemporary Central America and Yucatan, and historical New England. Among dozens of publications, he was author or editor of seven books, including Shadows in the Valley: A Cultural History of Illness, Death, and Loss in New England, 1840-1916 (2010), Plagues and Epidemics: Infected Spaces Past and Present (2010), and Beyond Germs: Explorations of Indigenous Depopulation in North America (2015). He was granted emeritus status upon his retirement in 2008.

The Swedlund Papers include extensive professional correspondence from his first professional appointment at Prescott College through the time of his retirement, along with numerous grant applications, unpublished papers and talks, and research data. Of particular note are extensive records and data files for his study of nineteenth-century demography in the Connecticut River Valley and Franklin County, Mass.

Born in Lancaster, Pa., in June 1939, the biological anthropologist R. Brooke Thomas earned both his BA (1963) and PhD (1972) from Penn State University. From his days as a graduate student, Thomas’ research centered on the biocultural adaptation of Andean peoples to life at high altitudes, including a suite of problems relating to hypoxia, cold, undernutrition, and disease.

The Thomas Papers are comprised of biological, ethnographic, and anthropometric survey data relating to Indian cultures in the Central Andes, particularly in Peru, along with Thomas’s dissertation and research data, notes for research and teaching, correspondence, and an extensive run of publications.

Before joining the faculty of the microbial genetics department at UMass Amherst in 1966, Curtis B. Thorne worked as the branch chief at the biolabs in Fort Detrick from 1948-1961 and 1963-1966 where his research focused on Bacillus anthracis, the microbe that causes anthrax. During his tenure at UMass, Curtis applied for and received numerous grants for his continued research on the bacterium, including funding from the U.S. Department of Defense. While his research was centered on the genetics and physiology of the anthrax bacillus, with an emphasis on developing a vaccine, it garnered the unwanted attention of local peace activists in 1989. Protestors, who feared Thorne’s research was linked to germ warfare, picketed outside of his laboratory and demanded that the university reject Pentagon funding. Even though the university and the town of Amherst refused to limit Thorne’s research, he decided not to seek an extension of his contract with the Army in 1990, a decision he regretted having to make. Four years later, Thorne retired from UMass and was honored by his former students with a symposium and dinner. Thorne died in 2008 at the age of 86.

Thorne’s papers consist of lab notebooks and materials relating to the classes he taught at UMass Amherst. Many of the notebooks are related to his research on Bacillus anthracis as well as other microbes including Bacills thuringiensis. His papers do not contain any information related to the funding of his research or the controversy that later surrounded it.

A composer, performer, poet, educator, and arts administrator, Fred Tillis was one of the major influences on the cultural life at UMass Amherst for forty years. Born in Galveston, Texas, in 1930, Tillis began playing jazz trumpet and saxophone even before his teens. A product of segregated schools, he graduated from Wiley College at the age of 19, and received his MA and PhD in music at the University of Iowa. As a performer and composer of unusual breadth, his work spans both the jazz and European traditions, and he has written for piano and voice, orchestra, choral pieces, chamber music, and in the African American spiritual tradition, drawing upon a wide range of cultural references. After teaching at Wiley, Grambling, and Kentucky State in the 1960s, Tillis was recruited to UMass in 1970 by his former adviser at Iowa, Philip Bezanson, to teach music composition and theory. Earning promotion to Professor in 1973, Tillis was appointed Director of the Fine Arts Center in 1978, helping to jump start some of the most successful arts initiatives the university has seen, including the the Afro American Music and Jazz program, the New World Theater, Augusta Savage Gallery, Asian Arts and Culture Program, and Jazz in July. Upon retirement from UMass in 1997, he was appointed Emeritus Director of the Fine Arts and remains active as a musician and poet.

The Tillis papers document an extraordinary career in the arts, focused on Fred Tillis’s work as a composer. Consisting primarily of musical scores along with an assortment of professional correspondence relating to his publishing and miscellaneous notes, the collection offers insight into the evolution of Tillis’s musical vision from the 1970s into the new millennium.

Established in western Massachusetts in 1863 as the Massachusetts Agricultural College, the University of Massachusetts Amherst is a national research university and the flagship campus of the state’s five-campus University system. UMass, one of the founding members of the Five College Consortium established in 1965, offers reciprocal student access among the University and Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges. The University currently enrolls approximately 24,000 undergraduate and graduate students, and offers 87 bachelors degree programs, 6 associates, 73 masters, and 51 doctoral programs in 10 schools and colleges.

The Archives of the University of Massachusetts Amherst document the institutional memory of the campus and serve as the largest and most comprehensive source of information on the history and cultural heritage of the University. As the collective memory of the university, the repository contains official records and items having historical value such as records of governance, policy, operation of administrative offices, departments, research, programs, and publications. Unpublished materials in the Archives include photographs, films, memorabilia, administrative records of major university offices, and the papers of presidents, trustees, administrative officers, and members of the faculty.

Please note that collections for individual faculty members, administrators, and students, as well as selected groups and administrative units at the University are listed separately in UMarmot. The Concordance to the Archives is an alphabetical listing of University departments, centers, groups, and other units, providing call numbers, when appropriate. Researchers may also wish to consult the online guide to UMass Amherst collections. Our digital repository, Credo includes a growing number of oral histories and digitized collections of papers and organizational records. YouMass is a wiki devoted to the history of the University and its predecessors, the Massachusetts Agricultural College and Massachusetts State College.

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• Concordance to the archives
• YouMass wiki

Established in 1863 as the Massachusetts Agricultural College, the University of Massachusetts Amherst is a national research university and the flagship campus of the states five-campus University system. UMass, one of the founding members of the Five College Consortium established in 1965, offers reciprocal student access among the University and Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges. The University currently enrolls approximately 24,000 undergraduate and graduate students, and offers 87 bachelor’s degree programs, 6 associate’s, 73 masters, and 51 doctoral programs in 10 schools and colleges.

Collocated for reasons of preservation and convenience of storage, the sound recordings in this series were produced under a variety of circumstances by a range of individuals and units in the university. Although they represent only a small proportion of the audio materials in UMass collections, they include a handful of recordings of administration activities, such as the Board of Trustees meetings and the Chancellor’s Committee investigating the women’s occupation of the Daily Collegian offices, along with selected recordings from the Distinguished Visitors Program.