Collections: C

Professor and Head of the Agricultural Economics Department at the Massachusetts Agricultural College who also worked briefly for Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Hoover, as well as the United States Department of Agriculture.

Includes biographical materials, correspondence concerning Cance’s role in the agricultural cooperative movement, addresses, articles (both in typescript and published), lectures, book reviews, typescript of a Carnegie study of factors in agricultural economics, a summary of a U.S. Senate report of which he was co-author, “Agricultural Cooperation and Rural Credit in Europe,” and research material. No documentation of his role as a delegate to the Hoover Conference on Economic Crisis, 1920, or his position as Supervisor of Market Research with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1922.

The Cannabis Reform Coalition at UMass Amherst was founded in 1991 and is considered the oldest student-run organization devoted to ending the prohibition on marijuana both locally and nationally and advocating for its industrial, medicinal, and recreational use for moral, environmental, and economic reasons. The CRC is one of the more active student organizations on campus and among other events, it sponsors the annual Extravaganja in April, which has attracted as many as 10,000 participants.

The CRC collection contains an assortment of fliers, posters, ephemera, and photographs, documenting the organization’s activities and activism, along with a small number of published and unpublished essays on the utility of hemp and cannbis products.

The “Peasant Bard” of Gill, Mass., Josiah D. Canning, published five books of poetry between 1838 and 1892 extolling the spiritual virtues of nature and the agrarian life. The son of a minister, Canning worked as a printer for several years before settling down to farming life, churning out poetry that reflected his reverence for the land.

This small collection consists of a printed copy of Josiah Canning’s fourth book, The Shad-Fishers, published by R.C. Graves in Greenfield, Mass., in 1854, along with a manuscript copy of the same work bound in workmanlike leather over boards. Although it is not possible to determine with certainty, the manuscript may be Canning’s own.

A distinguished, productive, and beloved professor of chemistry, Louis A. Carpino, born in 1927, was the son of Italian immigrants who settled in Des Moines, Iowa, where he grew up and went to high school and college. He earned his doctorate in organic chemistry from University of Illinois in 1953 and in the fall of 1954 arrived at UMass Amherst, where he would spend his career. A pioneer in the development of amino‐protecting groups and coupling reagents for use in the synthesis of biologically active materials such as pharmaceuticals, polynucleotides, PNAs, peptides, and small proteins, Carpino had some 30 patents to his name. He was honored both on campus (with, for example, a University Samuel Conti Faculty Fellowship Award and a College Outstanding Researcher Award), nationally (Hirschman Award from the American Chemical Society), and internationally (Humboldt Award and Max Bergmann Medal, both from Germany). In 1958, Carpino married one of his former chemistry students; Barbara Carpino finished her degree with the class of 1962. They had six children; the family joined Carpino on his sabbaticals in Italy and other overseas locations. Louis Carpino retired in 2004 with emeritus status and continued to be active in his lab. He passed away in January 2019.

The Carpino Papers consist of notebooks, research notes and files, correspondence, files relating to patents, and reprints of Carpino’s publications, along with personal papers and memorabilia, letters and notes (many written on the 3×5 index cards Carpino habitually carried in his shirt pocket), photographs, several passports, and honors and awards given to Carpino, including the 1998 Max Bergmann Medal. Notable is an illustrated comical family story created by Carpino as a teenager in Iowa, done in pen on loose paper.

Businessman in several partnerships in south-central Worcestor county who owned a general store in Webster, Massachusetts. Includes lists of partners (such as John P. Stockwell of Stockwell and Carroll), yearly salaries and profits, accounts of what he sold and how he was paid, lists of individual customers and manufacturing companies, and labor accounts of workers. Also contains an alphabetical index to the ledger and several pages of notes receivable and notes payable.

The environmental scientist Robert J. Carton emerged in the mid-1980s as one of the leading scientific critics of fluoridation of the water supply. After receiving his doctorate in Environmental Science from Rutgers University, Carton accepted a position in 1972 with the Office of Toxic Substances in the Environmental Protection Agency, assessing the risks associated with a range of toxic substances from asbestos to arsenic and hexachlorobenzene. By 1985, Carton became concerned about EPA standards for fluoride in drinking water, taking a public stance against undue political influence in framing those standards and insisting that there was no scientific evidence that fluorides prevented tooth decay and that any level of fluoride exposure presented a significant health hazard. In 1992, Carton left the EPA to work for as Chief of Environmental Compliance for the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command in Fort Detrick, Maryland.

Consisting primarily of research, notes, and some correspondence relating to the health effects of fluoridation of drinking water, the collection documents Robert Carton’s nearly two decade long struggle against the EPA and federal government. Also included are transcripts of filings relating to various legal challenges against fluoridation during the mid-1980s.

Daria Casinelli (left) with Beatrix Hoffman at a campus protest.

The Daria Casinelli Papers provide a lens into UMass student life in the 1980s via their creator and collector, Daria Casinelli, as well as documentation of her life after UMass in Chicago, Illinois and Waltham, Massachusetts. The papers consist largely of vast correspondence between Daria and her friends during her time at UMass as a student in the Social Thought and Political Economy (STPEC) program, including letters from Berkeley, California when she spent extended periods of time doing political organizing and activism. It contains photographs and records of her early life in Framingham, Massachusetts, including several family photographs that date to the 1940s. Throughout her time at UMass and beyond, Daria kept scrapbooks of photographs, ephemera, and original artwork documenting her life as a student and political activist, as well as collected published materials documenting Occupy Boston, abortion and reproductive rights, women’s rights, shelter work and homelessness, Apartheid in South Africa, Central America and the CIA, and related student activism.

Biographical sketch provided by Daria Casinelli: “My fractured family was part of white flight from Boston to ‘Framingburg’ in the 1970s. In the 1980s the death that moved that relocation along collided with my political awakening at UMass, Amherst. There I learned about the social reproduction of labor: no mother, no labor, reproduction, meh. Today, those realizations underlay my novel, ‘Occupy Shrugged’, forthcoming.

So, me and my sister grew up in the suburbs, without our mother and with only the physical presence of our father. We lived in one of the first cheap condominium complexes. Bishop Gardens opened about a mile from the railroad tracks at a time when manufacturing had just begun to transmogrify into retail, specifically a mile away in the other direction, at one of the first malls in the country, Shoppers World, Framingham. As a teenager I walked there and to the dusty downtown, once just Jewish, Italian American and Irish American, but at the time of this writing, very Brazilian. We were decidedly low-income and the lack of parenting made that worse. After freshmen year at George Washington University, I settled in happily at UMass, Amherst. There I sought out a major that would tell me: Why are people poor?

I loved Social Thought and Political Economy. It set me up for a career as a grant writer, occasional political activist and amatear philosopher, which in turn, led me to become a Buddhist, Taoist, Georgist, Socialist, Acupuncturist who dabbles in astrology. My first foray into Buddhistm was at a Japanese Pure Land Temple in Chicago. Great food, heart wrenching niche of artifacts from the US internment camps. After some seeking, I found the Insight Meditation Society, which influences me to this day. But then in my 60’s I realized I had never stopped believing in some kind of Spirit God, something good that animates the universe, so I became a Quaker. Since the day a Quaker taught me the foundations of non-violence during a civil disobedience training at UMass, I had always said that the Quakers and the Catholic Workers were the most ethical people I had ever met. Their lives follow their values unerringly. I dated a Catholic Worker, in Chicago in the 1990s: David Stein, the artist. I became a member of Friends Meeting Cambridge, MA, this year, 2025.”

Daria Casinelli was a close friend to Beatrix Hoffman, another UMass graduate whose collection is housed at the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center (SCUA) at UMass Amherst. The Daria Casinelli papers were processed by UMass student Yuni Gerzon, with some additional unprocessed accruals, and an inventory is available upon request.

The collection contains Super 8 film footage that SCUA does not currently have the ability to digitize.

Books of hours are the most common surviving form of the medieval book and are as diverse as the patrons who commissioned them. Beginning in the mid-thirteenth century, they flourished as part of a rich array of devotional works used to frame the temporal structure of a community’s spiritual lives. In keeping with individual spiritual and aesthetic preferences, books of hours were often customized to appeal to the particular purchaser, and they vary greatly through time and from region to region.

This diminutive and comparatively austere book of hours (Use of Rome) appears to have been produced near Bruges between about 1460 and 1470, possibly influenced by the prolific illuminator Willem Vrelant. Written in Latin in a skilled Gothic Italic Rotunda hand, the book lacks a calendar and miniatures of any kind, nor is there any evidence that any were ever present.

The Dominikanerinnenkloster St. Gertud (Dominican Convent of Saint Gertrude) operated in Cologne, Germany, for nearly five and half centuries. An important center in connection with German mysticism in the 13th and 14th centuries, the Kloster survived the Reformation, however persistently poor finances led to its decline in the 18th century. After it was abolished during a wave of secularization on October 14, 1802.

This diminutive book of hours was prepared by Dominican nuns at the Kloster St. Gertrud during the 1480s. Like some other German books of hours it lacks the calendar, Gospel lessons, and the two prayers to the Virgin, Obsecro te and O intemerata, however it includes additional liturgical texts, such as Offices for major feasts, as well as music for the funeral service. This copy may have been made for or by the prioress Magdalena Frankengruenerin (1481-1488), and remained in the convent until the eighteenth century.

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.