Collections: mss

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 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and professional correspondence; administrative and teaching records; research data; manuscripts of published and unpublished speeches, articles and books; photographs; and Bond family papers, especially those of Horace Bond’s father, James Bond.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.

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.

The Boston and Albany Railroad was formed between 1867 and 1870 from the merger of three existing lines, the Boston and Worcester (chartered 1831), the Western (1833), and the Castleton and West Stockbridge (1834). The corporation was a primary east-west transit through the Commonwealth, with branches connecting towns including Athol, Ware, North Adams, and Hudson, N.Y.

The nineteen atlases comprising this collection include detailed plans documenting the location and ownership of rights of way, land-takings, and other land transfers to or from the railroad company. Dating from the early years of operation for the corporation to just after the turn of the century, the atlases include maps of predecessor lines (Boston and Worcester Railroad Corporation and Western Rail-Road), as well as the Grand Junction Railway Company (Charlestown, Somerville, Everett, and Chelsea), the Ware River Railroad, and the Chester and Becket Railroad.

Chartered in June 1835, the Boston and Maine Railroad was the dominant railroad of northern New England for nearly one hundred years. This collection consists of records from the Engineering Department of the Fitchburg Division relating to the maintenance of bridges in Massachusetts, including correspondence, accident reports, financial records and progress reports on work recommended by bridge inspectors.

Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA to request materials from this collection.

In the fall 1987, a working group was formed in Boston to help coordinate planning for HIV-related services, prevention, and education. The Boston AIDS Consortium began operations the following January with the goal of ensuring effective services for people affected by HIV/AIDS and enabling them to live healthy and productive lives. In its eighteen year existence, the Consortium worked with over seventy public and private agencies and two hundred individuals.

The Records of the Boston AIDS Consortium provide valuable insight into community-based mobilization in response to the AIDS epidemic.

Although Quakers first worshipped in Boston in 1661, they were late in the game in organizing a formal meeting. A preparative meeting operated in the city for just over a hundred years (1707-1808) under the auspices of the Salem Monthly Meeting, and a second attempt at building a community began in 1870 with authorization of an indulged meeting in Roxbury. Set off formally as the Boston Monthly Meeting Friend in 1883, this meeting continued until 1944, when it merged with an independent meeting in neighboring Cambridge to create the current Friends Meeting at Cambridge.

The records in this collection offer thorough documentation of the Boston Monthly Meeting of Friends from its establishment as an indulged meeting in 1870 through to its merger in 1944 and change of name to the Friends Meeting at Cambridge. In addition to the meeting minutes, the collection includes substantial records of the monthly’s Friends Guild and Women’s Foreign Missionary Society.

L-R: Steven Botkin (MRC Executive Director), Thulanu Nkosi (men's work leader in South Africa), and Rob Okun (MRC Associate Director), ca. 2000

Joining a men’s group soon after his arrival in the Pioneer Valley in 1979, and finding the support and community there important personally, and professionally for his graduate work in anti-oppression education, Steven Botkin began his now decades long work in anti-sexist activism. While doing his doctoral work at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in 1982, Botkin co-founded the Men’s Resource Connection (MRC) to promote healthy ideas of masculinity and male leadership by challenging harmful stereotypes involving violence, sexism, and oppression and to create a local network devoted to this work. He completed his Ed.D. in 1988 (dissertation entitled Male Gender Consciousness: A Study of Undergraduate College Men) and continued to guide the MRC into a successful non-profit community-based organization, whose programs became a model for men’s organizing in communities around the world. In 2004, Botkin founded Men’s Resources International (MRI) to support the development of masculinity awareness and men’s engagement as allies within a global network. MRI eventually merged with MRC to form MERGE for Equality, Inc. Botkin additionally co-founded the Springfield based Men of Color Health Awareness (MOCHA), and the North American MenEngage Network, and has served as a leader, trainer, educator, and consultant for local, national, and global men’s groups and organizations, including in Africa, Asia, and Europe, and for groups such as the YMCA, Planned Parenthood Federation, Save the Children, the International Rescue Committee, and the Women’s Peacemakers Program.

The Steven Botkin Papers document Botkin’s long career in global men’s organizations and networks and their work in policy, education, empowerment, and organizing around the intersections of masculinity, gender, violence, sexism, oppression, power, politics, and society. Materials related to the men’s movement include significant records from the various groups Botkin co-founded and assisted, including organizational histories, program records and reports, meeting agendas, resource pamphlets, posters, networking and training curricula handbooks and handouts, a full run of the MRC magazine Voice Male, and video tapes and recordings. Botkin’s collection compliments and enriches the materials in the Men’s Resource Center Records.