Collections: mss

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

An attorney from Hadley, Mass., Alexandra D. Dawson was known throughout New England for her work in conservation law and environmental activism. Born in Maryland in 1931, Dawson married shortly after graduating from Barnard College and after raising a family of three, she resumed her education, earning a law degree from Harvard in 1966. Early in her legal career, she took up the cause of protecting “wildlife, wetlands, and woodlands.” She was among the earliest employees of the Conservation Law Foundation and later served as general counsel for the Metropolitan Area Planning Council. The author of a string of influential works in environmental law, including(1978),(1982), and the(1978-2006), she was also an educator, teaching at Antioch College (where she launched the environmental studies program), Tufts, the Kennedy School of Government, and Rhode Island School of Design. Among other commitments, Dawson was a key figure in the Kestrel Trust and served long stints on the Massachusetts Association of Conservation Commissions (MACC) and the Hadley Conservation Commission. Dawson died of complication from emphysema on Dec. 30, 2011.

The product of a forty year commitment to conservationism, Dawson’s papers provide valuable documentation of land preservation efforts in New England, with a focus on the evolution of the legal context. Dawson was a formidable figure in efforts to protect wetlands, agricultural land, and open space, and her papers offer insight into land use planning, her teaching, writing, and speaking.

Since the 1960s, the chiropractor Stephen Dean has been one of the leading activists in Massachusetts opposing fluoridation of the water supply. Based in Springfield, he has been an effective organizer in antifluoridation campaigns in communities around the state, arguing against fluoridation both as a medical hazard and a violation of individual choice. In 2005, he led the successful effort to strike down a state mandate to fluoridate all civic water supplies.

This small collection contains a handful of articles and clippings collected by the activist Stephen A. Dean regarding fluoride and the fluoridation of water supplies, and a note offering his expert perspective to journalists writing about the controversy.

Tom Deary was an union organizer for the IUE, serving on the executive board of Local 201 at the GE Plant in Lynn, Massachusetts. Involved in the 1969-1970 strike, Deary joined the IUE staff in 1971 and served for 30 years as an organizer, negotiator, and strike leader in the northeast and southern states. Frequently at odds with union careerists, he built a small labor newspaper in the 1980s into one with a regional focus, New England Labor News and Commentary.

The Deary papers include organizer reports, correspondence, IUE election campaign literature, and oral histories and videotapes. Letters, financial records, and business plans document Deary’s establishment of a regional labor newspaper, the New England Labor News and Commentary.

Includes transcripts of papers delivered at conferences (1985-1990) on democratic socialism, and correspondence (1984-1991) between Stephen Siteman, former Executive Secretary of the Socialist Party of America, and Frank Zeidler, former Mayor of Milwaukee, Socialist Party candidate for President of the United States, and national chairperson of the Socialist Party USA.

Dennis Magee has spent his life dedicated to the study of the natural world as a hunter, trapper, fisherman, environmental consultant, and scholar. He attended grad school at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the 1970s and was a protege of Harry Ahles, a field botanist and Botany professor, who co-wrote books on the flora of Illinois and the Carolinas. Magee and Ahles became friends and spent many hours together, building Ahles’ log cabin located on Horse Mountain in Hatfield, MA, going to diners, and collecting plants for the UMass Herbarium. Ahles taught Magee how to think about classification and how to construct useful keys of genera and species. Following Ahles’ passing in March 1981, Magee petitioned the Botany Department and Ahles’ sister Marjorie Armstrong to take Ahles’ large file of distribution records of New England plant species and the keys he used for his teaching, and turn it into a book on the flora of New England. This turned into a 17 year undertaking in which Magee gathered lists of species, created species and genera keys, secured funding, worked with illustrator Abigail Rorer to create illustrations, and other assorted book-related tasks. Finally, the book was published by UMass Press in September of 1999. It was well received and sold out of its initial 2500 print run within the first five years of publication. It is still widely used by universities as a textbook and a reference book by botanists, consultants, and other professionals.

Magee’s collection consists of his original handwritten species and genera keys as well as the original handwritten manuscript of Flora of the Northeast. An article titled “How I Wrote the Flora of the Northeast: A Manual of the Vascular Flora of New England and Adjacent New York”, which was published in a 2018 issue of Phytoneuron, accompanies the collection.

A druggist by training, William Denslow became interested in botany as a means of combating tuberculosis through outdoor exercise. As his interests developed, Denslow amassed an herbarium that included between 11,000 and 15,000 specimens, including both American and European species.

The Denslow collection consists of a single volume of manuscripts, chiefly letters, collected from significant botanists and other individuals, including William Henry Brewer, Mordecai Cubitt Cooke, Asa Gray, Isaac Hollister Hall, Thomas P. James, Horace Mann, Edward Sylvester Morse, Charles Horton Peck, George Edward Post, Frederick Ward Putnam, George Thurber, and John Torrey.

A working class native of Ware, Mass., Robert E. Dillon was a student at Massachusetts State College when he was drafted into the Army in 1943. After his induction at Fort Devens, Mass., and training for the Quartermaster Corps in Virginia and California, Dillon was assigned to duty as a mechanic and driver with the First Service Command. Stationed at Rest Camps number 5 and 6 in Khanspur, India (now Pakistan), Dillon’s company maintained the trucks and other vehicles used to carry supplies over the Himalayas to Chinese Nationalist forces. After he left the service in February 1946, having earned promotion to T/5, Dillon concluded his studies at UMass Amherst on the GI Bill and earned a doctorate in Marketing from Ohio State. He taught at the University of Cincinnati for many years until his death in 1985.

The Dillon Papers consist of 178 letters written by Dillon to his family during his service in World War II, along with several written to him and an assortment of documents and ephemera. Beginning with basic training, the letters provide an essentially comprehensive account of Dillon’s military experience and interesting insight into a relatively quiet, but sparsely documented theater of war.

A fixture on the late Victorian and Edwardian English stage, Frederic Dobell headlined a variety of productions, appearing in theatres and touring from London to Edinburgh. Late in his career, Dobell played roles from Shakespeare to melodrama. He died in London in August 1916 at the age of 72.

A small collection dating from the last three decades of his career, the Dobell Papers including correspondence regarding acting engagements, 14 part books, six broadsides advertising performances, and a fine clutch of materials relating to the play On the Verge, Or, A Woman’s Honor, including: four watercolor set designs, five stage layouts, a musical score.

Deeply involved in the Polish community in Boston, Elaine (Proborszcz) Dobrowski (1923-2009) was the wife of attorney Francis R. Dobrowksi and mother of two children. She was a resident of Dorchester and Milton, Mass., and a long-time member of Our Lady of Czestochowa Church in South Boston.

Compiled by Elaine Dobrowski, this collection of photographs, printed materials, and news clippings documents the Polish community in Boston from the 1930s through the 1990s. The collection includes photographs of the Kosciusko Monument in the Boston Public Gardens, a children’s dance festival, and a Polish Women’s circle outing at Blinstrub’s Village as well as images of parades, receptions, and conventions.

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

An historian of modern British drama, Joseph Donohue was a longtime member of the Department of English at UMass Amherst. A native of Brookline, Mass., Donohue was educated at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown before receiving his doctorate at Princeton (1965), and he studied directing at both Columbia and Yale. After five years at Princeton, he joined the faculty at UMass in 1971, where he remained for thirty four years. The author of numerous articles and books on the British and Irish theatre, Donohue was author — among many other works — of Dramatic Character in the English Romantic Age (1970) and Theatre in the Age of Kean (1975) and editor of the London Stage, 1800-1900 Project. A past president of the American Society for Theatre Research, he was also a fixture in local performances, including the Valley Light Opera Company. Upon retirement from the department in 2005, Donohue was named Professor Emeritus.

Consisting of hundreds of theatrical programs and other ephemera, the Donohue collection documents a lifetime of avid theater-going. The astonishing array of playwrights and plays represented in the collection, and the diversity of theatres (mostly in New York and London), provides a nearly exhaustively chronicle of Donohue’s theatrical habits from his days as a graduate student to nearly the present.