Collections: mss

A resident of Haydenville, Mass., during the 1930s, C. H. Wheeler was evidently captivated with the profound political changes sweeping the nation during the years of the Great Depression.

Containing hundreds of political cartoons clipped from local newspapers and national media, C. H. Wheeler’s scrapbook documents media reactions to the Great Depression and New Deal, the presidential election of 1936, Alf Landon and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and national and international political currents.

One of twelve children of Obadiah and Agnes (Tuttle) Wheeler, Truman Wheeler was born in Southbury, Conn., on Nov. 26, 1741. After completing his education, reportedly at Yale, Wheeler moved north to Great Barrington, Mass., in the spring of 1764. Acquiring property about a mile south of the center of town, he soon established himself as a general merchant trading in silk, fabrics, and a variety of domestic goods.

The Wheeler account book represents the initial years of a thriving, late colonial mercantile business in far western Massachusetts. Beginning in June 1764, not long after Wheeler set up shop in Great Barrington, the account book includes meticulous records of sales of domestic goods ranging from cloth (linen, silks, and osnabrig) to buttons, ribbons, and pins, snuff boxes, a “small bible,” “jews harps,” and tobacco. Among the prominent names that appear as clients are members of the Burghardt and Sedgwick families.

Truman Wheeler, Jr., of Great Barrington, Mass., is considerably more obscure than his father, a prominent merchant, but in the two decades after the War of 1812, he made his living raising and selling rye, oats, and corn, tending sheep, and operating a substantial cider mill.

Wheeler Jr.’s account book records an array of fairly typical transactions in a non-cash economy, in which goods (grain, cider, barrels, food) or services (rental of the cider mill, lodging, labor) of one sort were exchanged for another. The frequency and scale of his cidering operation, and his rental of his cider mill when not used, is a distinguishing feature of his account book, which includes accounts with members of the Burghardt, Ives, Tucker, Warner, Wheeler, Willcox, and other families, as well as with Jack Negro, to whom Wheeler sold grain, pork, and brandy in exchange for assistance in haying.

Charles Lewis Whipple was a noted journalist, editor, and the first ombudsperson for the Boston Globe. As a student at Harvard in the 1930s, Whipple joined the Young Communist League, carrying his radical politics with him when he joined the Globe’s staff in 1936 and became an active member of the American Newspaper Guild. Although classified as unfit for military duty due to the loss of vision in one eye, Whipple joined the Red Cross during the Second World War, and served with distinction with over thirty months of overseas service. After returning to civilian life and severing ties with the Communist Party, he resumed his position at the Globe, rising steadily to become editor of the opinion page in 1962 and ombudsperson in 1975. An editorial he wrote in 1967 is considered the first editorial in a major American newspaper to oppose the war in Vietnam. Although he formally retired from the Globe in 1979. Whipple worked an additional three years with the Xinhua News Agency in Beijing as editor of the Beijing Review and the China Daily, China’s first English-language daily. Whipple died in Northampton, Mass., in 1991, following complications from surgery.

A mixture of personal and professional correspondence, writing, and subject and clipping files, the Charles Whipple Papers document a long and exceptional career in journalism. The diverse roles that Whipple filled at the Boston Globe from the 1930s through 1970s resulted in rich documentation of his work as an organizer for the American Newspaper Guild on the eve of the Second World War; his writing and editorial work during the Vietnam War and as the Globe’s Ombudsman in the 1970s; and the three years he spent in China setting up an English-language newspaper during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

As an undergraduate at the University of California Berkeley, Howard Whisler was introduced to the study of zoosporic fungi, beginning what would become a lifelong interest in evolutionary protistology. During his graduate work at Berkeley, Whisler focused on fungi associated with invertebrates, receiving his doctorate in 1960 for a study of the entomogenous fungus Amoebidium parasiticum. He joined the faculty at the University of Washington in 1963, where he remained until his retirement in 1999. A prolific researcher, and developer of the fungal research program at the Friday Harbor Marine Biological Laboratory, he became noted for his work on zoosporic fungi and protists, particularly of parasites or commensals in arthropods, with publications ranging from studies of reproduction in the Monoblepharidales to the molecular systematics of Saprolegnia in salmon, and the sexual stages and life cycle of Coelomomyces, a fungal pathogen of mosquitos. An active member of the Mycological Society of America, Whisler was also a founder of the International Society of Evolutionary Protistology with Max Taylor and Lynn Margulis. Whisler died on Sept. 16, 2007, at the age of 76.

The Whisler Papers contain correspondence, notebooks, scanning electron micrographs, and motion pictures dating primarily from the mid- to late 1970s.

A physical education teacher from Rome, New York, Elizabeth W. Whitaker became an avid recorder of gravestone inscriptions in the 1940s. She died in 1992 at the age of 93.

The core of the Whitaker collection consists of 25 receipts and accounts relating to the early marble industry in western Massachusetts. The key figures in this series are Rufus Willson and his father-in-law, John Burghardt, who quarried stone near West Stockbridge, Mass., conveying it to Hudson, N.Y. The collection also includes a selection of photographs and postcards of gravestones, mostly in New England and New York; two folders of typed transcriptions and newspaper clippings of epitaphs from the same region, ranging in date from the early colonial period to the mid-19th century; and a price list of Barre granite from Wetmore and Morse Granite Co., 1934.

Access restrictions: Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA in advance to request materials from this collection.

A not-for-profit media company based in Burlington, Vermont, White Light Communications produced dozens of videos during the late 1980s and early 1990s reflecting the voices and experiences of psychiatric survivors. With initial funding from the National Institute of Mental Health, Executive Director Paul Engels and his colleagues, all psychiatric survivors themselves, built a fully-equipped television production studio and conducted nearly one hundred interviews with ex-patients and leaders in the antipsychiatry movement. Although most of the interviews were conducted in Burlington, they also produced documentaries, and covered national events such as the final two Alternatives conferences and “Self Help Live,” a broadcast that focused on highlighting consumer/survivor leaders.

The hundreds of video interviews and other productions that comprise the White Light Communications collection were produced by, for, and about psychiatric survivors. Paul Engels interviewed nearly a hundred ex-patients including important leaders in the movement such as Judi Chamberlin, Sally Zinman, Howie the Harp, and George Ebert, and several episodes focused on the mental health system and activism in Vermont. The subjects of the interviews range widely from homelessness to involuntary treatment, peer support, suicide, surviving the mental health system, and the history of the psychiatric survivors movement.

A cooper based in South Hadley, Massachusetts, during the first half of the nineteenth century, Cyrus White made tubs and barrels of all varieties: soap tubs, leach tubs, oil barrels and casks, cheese presses, butter churns, and buckets.

Cyrus White’s daybook is a closely focused record of the range of work of one cooper in a country town in Massachusetts. White’s work ranged from repairing wheelbarrows and making washing machines to making all varieties of a cooper’s oeuvre.

A convinced Friend who became an advocate for peace, Willis H. White was a member of the East Greenwich Monthly Meeting. A secretary in the Providence-based real estate firm William H. White & Sons, White was active in several organizations promoting peace and spiritual renewal within the Society of Friends in the years after the First World War.

The bulk of Willis H. White’s papers are concentrated on his activities on behalf of peace, social justice, and the Society of Friends in the period 1919-1922. The collection includes materials documenting White’s work with the American Friends Service Committee and on invigorating the Society through the London Conference of All Friends and the evangelical Forward Movement of Friends, and there is a relatively small, but interesting series of letters from the labor and peace activist, A. J. Muste.

Shortly after graduating from college in 1920, Martha Richardson married Philip F. Whitmore, a market gardener from Sunderland, Mass., and 1915 graduate of Massachusetts Agricultural College. As a housewife and mother of three, Martha supported Philip, who became a Trustee of his alma mater and a representative in the State House (1950-1962). Philip Whitmore died in 1962, with Martha following nineteenth years later.

This small collection includes six scattered diaries of Martha Whitmore, kept somewhat irregularly during the years 1937, 1947, 1950, 1953, 1957, and 1962. Largely personal in nature, they are centered on home and family life, husband and children, and Martha’s love of nature, but they include occasional references to Philip Whitmore’s political activities and the University of Massachusetts.