Collections: B

Twenty-four page register kept by unnamed person, possibly from a Quabbin town, listing boarders by name, payment received, and employee accounts. Payments noted in detail from February to October, 1850. Boarders included several doctors and L.S. Hills, possibly Leonard S. Hills of the Amherst, Massachusetts hat factory. Employee accounts list many women with Irish surnames, including Ellen O’Leary, Ellen Callahan, and Margaret Murphy.

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.

A Quaker worship group was formed in Bolton, Mass., in 1763 and grew into a separate monthly meeting in 1799. Always a small outpost, regular worship continued there until 1954, when the meetinghouse was sold to the museum at Old Sturbridge Village. The meeting was formally laid down to Worcester Monthly Meeting in 1972.

The surviving records of Bolton Monthly Meeting include relatively complete minutes from 1799 to 1972, plus records of marriages, births, and deaths into the latter years of the nineteenth century.

Educator, sociologist, scholar, and author. Includes personal and professional correspondence; administrative and teaching records; research data; manuscripts of published and unpublished speeches, articles and books; photographs; and Bond family papers, especially those of Horace Bond’s father, James Bond. Fully represented are Bond’s two major interests: black education, especially its history and sociological aspects, and Africa, particularly as related to educational and political conditions.

Correspondents include many notable African American educators, Africanists, activists, authors and others, such as Albert C. Barnes, Claude A. Barnett, Mary McLeod Bethune, Arna Bontemps, Ralph Bunche, Rufus Clement, J. G. St. Clair Drake, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edwin Embree, John Hope Franklin, E. Franklin Frazier, W. C. Handy, Thurgood Marshall, Benjamin E. Mays, Pauli Murray, Kwame Nkrumah, Robert Ezra Park, A. Phillip Randolph, Lawrence P. Reddick, A. A. Schomburg, George Shepperson, Carter G. Woodson and Monroe Work.

Diane Bonder made experimental film and videos, using Super 8 and 16mm. Her poetic semi-narrative and autobiographical films explore themes of identity, landscape, memory and loss. Growing up in Northampton, Massachusetts, she graduated with her BA from UMass Amherst and studied photography at the Photographic Resource Center in Boston. She received her MFA from Rutgers University in 1993. In 1996, Bonder moved to Brooklyn, making it her home. Bonder was an artist in residence at UCross (Wyoming) and Squeaky Wheel (Buffalo, N.Y.) and received grants from NYFA and NYSCA. She maintained a longstanding relationship with Millennium Film Workshop, where she taught herself the optical printing techniques, which became part of her signature visual style. Bonder’s award-winning films have been screened at the Whitney Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Anthology Film Archives, NY, SF Cinematheque, Mix NYC and at many international film festivals, universities and curated screenings. Her work continues to be screened around the world. Retrospective screenings of her work have been held at MOMA, Hallwalls (Buffalo, N.Y.) and Millennium Film Workshop (New York).

The Diana Bonder Papers provides insight into her creative process as a filmmaker and photographer. The collection features film reels, U-Matic, Hi8, VHS, DVDs, and audio, which include Closer to Heaven, You Are Not From Here, The Physics of Love, Dear Mom, Tongue in Chic, Parole, Dangerous When Wet; film notebooks; slides, negatives, contacts sheets, which include portraits, landscapes, family photographs, Rutgers (installation, film, other project studies/prep), “Blood and Veins,” and others; photographic prints; and two large lightboxes and several small lightboxes.

After receiving a doctorate from the University of London in 1962, Geoffrey Boothroyd was invited to join the faculty in Mechanical Engineering at UMass in 1967. An expert in automated assembly, mechanization, and automation, Boothroyd quickly became a leading figure in manufacturing engineering at the University. Active in a variety of professional organizations, he was author of dozens of articles and two textbooks.

The Boothroyd collection consists almost exclusively of two of his major publications from the late 1970s: Feeding and Orienting Techniques for Small Parts and Design for Assembly.

An award-winning photojournalist, Kathy Borchers began a thirty year career with the Providence Journal in the mid-1980s. A native of Dayton, Ohio, she and her twin sister Karen (also a photojournalist) took up photography in high school and refined their technique as undergraduates at Bowling Green State University. After receiving her master’s degree at the Indiana University School of Journalism in 1981, Borchers worked for three years with the Topeka Capital-Journal before landing in Providence. In addition to covering general news and sports, she took on a number of special assignments and longer-form photoessays over the years in southern New England. She retired in 2015.

A rich sampling from a long career in photojournalism, the collection includes photographic negatives and prints along with associated published materials. Centered primarily on her time with the Providence Journal, the collection reflects the breadth of Borchers’ assignments, including general news, sports coverage, and longer-form photoessays, in both black and white and color. The collection also includes five self-made books: three on long-term photographic projects for the Journal and two career retrospectives.

124-page handwritten autobiographical account written in Polish by 100 year-old Edward A. Borkowski of Turner Falls, Massachusetts.

A nationally renowned labor arbitrator and writer, Tim L. Bornstein graduated from Harvard Law School in 1957. After stints working for Goldberg, Feller & Bredhoff in Washington, D.C., the National Labor Relations Board, and the Retail Clerks International Union, Bornstein joined the faculty at UMass Amherst in 1969, becoming a Professor of Law and Industrial Relations in the Business School. He taught at UMass for twenty years, maintaining a practice in arbitration and mediation all the while. During his career, Bornstein served as a Vice President and Governor for the National Academy of Arbitrators and has wrote two books and numerous articles on labor law and arbitration. He died on June 3, 2019.

Bornstein’s professional interest in organized labor translated into collecting historical memorabilia from the labor movement. His collection contains a range of union-related convention badges and buttons, broadsides, union cards, small banners, and other ephemeral items.

Born on February 12, 1936, to John and Jenny Bos of Tonawanda, New York, John Henry Bos graduated from Carnegie Tech with a B.A. in drama. His career in the arts began with a job in technical support in summer theaters and included work at major theaters, such as the Theatre of the Living Arts in Philadelphia, and Deputy Director of the performing arts division for the New York State Council on the Arts. Bos served as Director of Performance Programs for National Public Radio during the 1980s where he earned a Peabody Award. Following his time at NPR, he hosted Arts America, a weekly cultural television program produced by the United States Information Agency. In the 1990s, Bos relocated to Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, where he provided arts consulting and was involved in the revival of Memorial Hall, one of the many locations in which he hosted musical performances as a part of Rural Renaissance. It was during this time that Bos began writing, first as a member of the writing group, Spirit of the Written Word, at the CancerConnection during his first bout with cancer, and later as a bi-weekly columnist for the Greenfield Recorder. In his column, “Connecting the Dots,” Bos advocated for climate change and political life. He died of December 11, 2024, at the age of 88.

The John Bos Collection consists of an array of materials related to his career in the arts including theater programs, photographs, documents from the Theatre of the Living Arts in Philadelphia, as well as copies of his articles printed in the Greenfield Recorder and other publications.