Collections: M

One of the oldest programs of its kind in the country, the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at UMass Amherst was established by the poet Joseph Langland in 1963, offering students an opportunity for intensive focus on their creative work. Unlike the Iowa Writers Workshop, where Langland had studied, students in the UMass program were required to take coursework outside of writing workshops. Over its first fifty years, the program has grown into one of the top ten in the nation and its graduates and faculty have been recognized with awards from the Pulitzer to the National Book Award, Pushcart Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and US Poet Laureate.

The MFA collection contains a growing body of work from students, alumni, and faculty affiliated with the Program for Poets and Writers at UMass Amherst. Among the hundreds of volumes are novels, collections of short stories, plays, and poetry, including a large number of chapbooks and small press imprints.

Originally a proponent of fluoridating the water supply, the dentist Robert J.H. Mick became an ardent opponent following animal studies he conducted in the late 1940s. Although he alleged that he was threatened with court martial for his views while serving in the Army in Germany between 1953 and 1956, Mick has remained a high profile professional critic of fluoridation, famously offering a $100,000 prize to any one who could prove that fluoridation of water was healthy. The prize remained unclaimed. Mick ran as a Republican for congress in New Jersey in 1970, largely as an antifluoridation crusader.

The Mick Papers contain a small quantity of correspondence, talks, and affidavits relating to a deacdes-long career in the antifluoridation movement, as well as publications and other materials relating to fluoridation of water supplies.

Founded in coastal Camden, Maine, the Midcoast Friends Meeting began as an independent worship group in 1962 and was set off as Camden Monthly Meeting in 1964. After the meeting moved to Damariscotta, it changed name in 1972 to Midcoast Friends Meeting.

The records of Midcoast Monthly Meeting (formerly Camden Monthly) are comprised of a nearly unbroken run of minutes from 1964 to 2009, lacking only 2002.

Country store in the village of Titicut in Middleborough, Massachusetts, owned by members of either the Clark or Pratt families of the village. Includes goods for sale (groceries, cloth, hardware, and liquor), the method and form of payment (cash, rags, straw, wood, brick, and produce), customers’ names, and ways that families and women earned credit (producing braid or carting goods for the owners).

Middlebury, Vermont, was home to a Quaker worship group affiliated with Burlington Monthly Meeting from 1956 to 1962, and again beginning in 1970. This latter group led to formation of a preparative meeting in 1971 and to setting off as a monthly meeting in 1976 under the care of Northwest Quarter. Middlebury Friends Meeting has overseen the preparative meeting in South Starksboro Monthly (1982-1996) and a worship group in Rochester.

The meticulously maintained records of Middlebury Friends Meeting include a comprehensive set of minutes and extensive newsletters for the meeting beginning at the time of its establishment.

Friends in Middletown, Connecticut, began holding meetings under the care of Hartford Monthly Meeting by 1943 and were set off as a monthly meeting of their own in 1956. Drawing heavily from the faculty and staff at Wesleyan College, at least in their early years, the meeting is part of Connecticut Valley Quarter.

The records of Middletown Monthly Meeting document more than sixty years of a Quaker meeting in the lower Connecticut Valley beginning in the mid-1950s.

A pioneer in scientific agriculture, Manly Miles was born in Homer, N.Y., in 1826. A naturalist by inclination with a strong practical streak, Miles took a degree in medicine at Rush Medical College (1850) and practiced as a physician for eight years. His interests in the natural sciences, however, soon left him to abandon medicine, and after accepting a position with the State Geological Survey in Michigan from 1858-1861, he turned to academia. An early member of the faculty at Michigan State College, and later Illinois State College, he was recruited to the agricultural faculty at Massachusetts Agricultural College by President Paul Chadbourne in 1882. Four years later, however, following Chadbourne’s untimely death, Miles returned to Lansing, Mich., where he remained until his death in 1898. During his career, he was noted for his interests in organic evolution and plant and animal breeding.

The Miles collection contains 8 notebooks containing notes on reading. In addition to a general notebook on scientific matters, the remaining seven are organized by subject: Breeds of animals, Farm buildings, Farm economy, Feeding and animals, Implements, Manures, and Stock breeding.

Four generations of the Miller family from Roxbury and Hull, Massachusetts. Includes photographs mounted on twenty-eight sheets of posterboard and 158 slides stored in two slide trays that are comprised of formal and informal family portraits; family businesses; church and business gatherings; a wedding announcement; and postcards from the early 1900s depicting public recreation sites. More recent photographs reveal how the public recreation sites have changed over the years. Robert Parker Miller, a graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a member of the Miller family, displayed these images in an exhibit entitled “Trying to Live the American Dream” (1986, Wheeler Gallery).

Known in the psychiatric survivors’ movement as Kalisa, Cynthia Miller was a radical activist on behalf of the mentally ill. An ex-patient based in New York, she became a member of Project Release in the early 1970s, one of the first wave of organizations fighting for the civil rights of mental patients and combatting forced institutionalization, and was a contributor to Madness Network News and other publications. A poet, writer, and a committed feminist and out lesbian, she took part in civil disobedience to oppose electroconvulsive therapy, working with Judi Chamberlin, George Ebert, Leonard Roy Frank, and others.

Though varied and fragmentary, Cynthia Miller’s collection is a rich resource for study of the early history of the psychiatric survivors movement and the work of one activist in resisting psychiatric oppression. The collection contains some of Kalisa’s writings and correspondence along with ephemera and a varied collection of newspapers, newsletters, and other publications relating to Project Release and several other organizations that Kalisa supported, including the Mental Patients Liberation Front and the Alliance for the Liberation of Mental Patients.

A nearly lifelong resident of Springfield, Massachusetts, J. Wesley Miller was actively engaged in the city’s politics. Often described as an eccentric activist, Miller graduated from Colby College and later earned his law degree from Western New England College of Law. Although he never practiced as an attorney, Miller did sue the law school upon graduation for “educational malpractice,” a suit that was settled out of court. Miller taught English at Heidelberg College in Ohio and at the University of Wisconsin, and it is at the latter institution where it seems he formed his habit of collecting street literature, mostly posters and fliers. Evidently consumed by a desire to collect such materials, Miller accrued a vast quantity of street literature by the time of his death in 2005.

The collection consists primarily of flyers and posters collected by Miller in Madison, Wisconsin and throughout western Massachusetts that reflect the contemporary history of the two regions. The literature ranges from announcements of student protests and rallies to advertisements for local pubs. Miller signed each item, possibly as part of a ritual to catalog the collection. Also included is a microfilm copy of Miller’s diaries.