Collections: mss

Quaker worship began at Swansea, Mass., by 1701, under the care of Rhode Island Monthly Meeting, with the Swansea Monthly Meeting being set off in 1732. Situated in an area with a relatively large Quaker population, Swansea oversaw worship groups and preparative meetings in nearby Fall River, Freetown, Somerset, Taunton, and Troy. Swansea was divided by the separation of 1845, with the Wilburite meeting persisting for about twenty years.

The records of Swansea Monthly Meeting are a rich assemblage of meeting minutes, vital records, and other materials, covering nearly two and a half centuries of Quaker activity on Cape Cod. The collection also includes records of the Fall River and Swansea Preparative Meetings.

The Separation of 1845 that affected the New England Yearly Meeting of Friends was profoundly felt throughout Rhode Island and Cape Cod. The meeting at Swansea, Mass., split in 1844, with the Wilburite Monthly of that name becoming part of the Rhode Island Quarterly Meeting. In 1863, Swansea Monthly was laid down, with the Fall River Preparative Meeting transferring to Providence Monthly Meeting (Wilburite). A small number of Friends in Swansea rejected the decision to lay down the meeting and continued to meet as an independent body until 1865.

The short history of the Wilburite Swansea Monthly Meeting in four slender volumes of meeting minutes (one from the women’s meeting) and a thin records of marriages.

Just 36 years of age, Jane Swift became Acting Governor of Massachusetts in 2001, the first and only woman to hold that office, the youngest woman governor in US history, and the only one to give birth while in office. A native of North Adams, Swift served as a Republican in the state Senate from 1990-1996, becoming widely known for her role in passing the Education Reform Act of 1993. Defeated in a bid to represent the 1st District in the US Congress, she served in the William Weld administration before earning election as Lieutenant Governor in 1998, rising to the governorship three years later when Paul Cellucci resigned to become Ambassador to Canada. During her time in office, Swift, but her tenure is remembered both for her calm management of the fallout from the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and for a series of controversies that ultimatley cost her political support. Trailing eventual nominee Mitt Romney in the 2002 Republican gubentorial primary, Swift abandoned her campaign. Returning home to Williamstown, where she has been involved in several educational initiatives, including serving as Director of Sally Ride Science, a lecturer in Leadership Studies at Williams Colege, and since July 2011, CEO of Middlebury Interactive Languages. She remains active in Republican politics.

Centered on her political career, Jane Swift’s Papers provide insight into her experiences as governor of Massachusetts with content ranging from policy briefings to topical files, technical reports, economic and budgetary information, correspondence, legal filings, and transition reports at the time of leaving office. The visual documentation of Swift’s time in office includes a wide range of photographs, videotapes, paraphernalia, and souvenirs. There is comparatively little material is available to document Swift’s time in the state senate.

A Quaker and philanthropist from Worcester, Mass., Sarah J. Swift was a noted supporter of Friends’ missions in Palestine and Jamaica for over half a century. The wife of D. Wheeler Swift, an innovator in the manufacture of envelopes, Swift began to support the Friends’ foreign missions by the 1890s, becoming a major benefactor of the Eli and Sibyl Jones Mission and girls’ school in Ramallah and of the small Quaker mission at Buff Bay, Jamaica.

The Swift papers contain a thick series of letters from the Society of Friends’ Eli and Sybil Jones Mission in Ramallah, Palestine, documenting their activity between 1890 and 1942, with a much smaller series of letters relating to the mission at Buff Bay, Jamaica. The missionaries’ letters — including circular letters to supporters and others addressed to Swift personally — discuss school operations and local affairs in Palestine and Jamaica. Of particular note are letters discussing the work at Ramallah around the turn of the twentieth century and several letters discussing the hardships of wartime and recovery from war.

The Tax Equity Alliance for Massachusetts (TEAM) was formed in 1987 as a coalition of tax reformers made up government groups, civic and business leaders, human services advocates, unions, and others who shared the conviction that fair taxation and quality services must go hand-in-hand and who opposed extreme tax reduction for the dire impact it would have on state budgets and support for state programs.

This small collection contains a copy of “Talking Tax,” a publication of the Tax Equity Alliance for Massachusetts, along with brochures for their volunteers and for the public.

A member of a distinguished family of New England educators and clergymen, Brainerd Taylor played an key role assisting the U.S. Army in taking its first steps into modern mechanized warfare. Born in Newtonville, Massachusetts, in 1877, Taylor entered Harvard with the class of 1899, but during the rush of enthusiasm accompanying the start of the Spanish American War, he left before completing his degree to join the military. Serving with the Coast Artillery for several years, he became the Chief Motor Transport Officer for the Advance Section of the Service of Supply for the American Expeditionary Force during the First World War, earning promotion to Colonel, a Distinguished Service Medal, and the Legion of Honor from France for his efforts. Taylor married twice, first to Vesta Richardson, who died in 1919, and then to Helen Cady. Taylor died in 1955.

The Taylor family collection contains more than 1,000 letters documenting the military career and personal life of Brainerd Taylor, with particularly thick coverage of the period of the First World War when he was stationed in France, building the Motor Transport Corps virtually from scratch. These letters are exceptionally well written and rich in description, both about his duties and his travels in France and Germany. The collection also includes Taylor’s extensive correspondence to his father, James Brainerd Taylor (1845-1929), and correspondence relating to Taylor’s wives, children, and grandchildren.

Born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1939, F.J.R. “Max” Taylor became an internationally recogninzed specialist in phytoplankton. Educated primarily in his native South Africa, Taylor studied Zoology and Botany at the University of Cape Town, receiving his doctorate in 1965 for a dissertation on the phytoplankton communities in the southwestern Indian Ocean. Joining the faculty of the Departments of Earth and Ocean Sciences and Botany at the University British Columbia in 1964, he became full professor at the age of 35. At UBC, he continued to work on the phytoplankton of the Indian Ocean, preparing the seminal Indian Ocean Dinoflagellate Atlas (1976), which included some of the earliest electron micrographic illustrations of dinoflagellates. He was a pioneer in the study of the ecology of harmful algal blooms (red tides and brown tides), and he and Anand Prakash were the first to identify the causative dinoflagellate behind paralytic shellfish poisoning. His diverse research interests ran the gamut of ecological and evolutionary studies, from study of cryptomonad endosymbionts in Mesodinium to the feeding mechanism in Protoperidinium and the motility of the dinoflagellate transverse flagellum. An important figure in paleopalynology, he was also an early contributor to Serial Endosymbiosis Theory for chloroplasts and mitochondria. Named a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1997 and recipient of the Yasumoto Lifetime Achievement Award by 9th Int Conf Harmful Algal Blooms (2000), Taylor was a cofounder of the International Society for Evolutionary Protistology (1975) and Founding President of International Society for the Study of Harmful Alagae (1998). He retired in 2005.

Consisting primarily of research notes, drafts of publications, and illustrations, the Taylor Papers offer primary documentation of the ecology and evolutionary biology of dinoflagellates.

With a B.A. in literature from Antioch College and an M.A. in education from Columbia University, Katya Sabaroff Taylor has worked as a journalist and editor, health educator, women’s studies instructor, massage therapist, yoga teacher, and workshop facilitator. In 1980 she founded Creative Arts and Healing workshops, classes, and retreats to nurture the link between creativity and the healing process.

The collection features a wide range of Taylor’s work, reflecting her lifelong love of writing and teaching. Her poetry, essays, and fiction are included along with her memoirs and personal accounts, the collected writings of several classes of prison inmates enrolled in Taylor’s creative writing workshops, and the recollections of former members of the Liberation News Service.

The wheelwright Levi Ely Taylor was born in Longmeadow, Mass., on Nov. 17, 1795, the son of Nathaniel and Jerusha Taylor. Marrying a woman from Rocky Hill, Conn., Laura Peirce, he settled in Longmeadow and built a prosperous life for himself in his trade. His eldest son, Newton, followed him into the business.

Taylor’s daybook contains careful records of a wheelwright from Longmeadow, Mass., documenting his varied work in the repair of carriages. The transactions that appear in the volume range from making whiffletrees to shortening wheels, making and fitting out carriage seats, and painting and varnishing vehicles, with occasional forays into selling goods such as wheelbarrows and straw cutters.

A popular Spanish-language community radio program broadcast on the New England Public Radio station WFCR, Tertulia featured a wide range of music from the Caribbean region and South and Central America, news in both English and Spanish, and discussions of topics of importance to the Latino community. As of 2017, the show has enjoyed over thirty years on air.

The Tertulia collection consists of hundreds of cassette recordings of the radio show, mostly taken as air-checks and many of interviews with members of the Latino community in Western New England.