Collections: mss

For the tercentenary of the Massachusetts court system, Paul J. Liacos, Chief Justice of the the Supreme Judicial Court convened a 45-member Commission on the Future of the Courts (also called Reinventing Justice) to examine the court’s role and responsibilities for the next century. The commission was charged both with creating a new vision for justice and for proposing a way for the system to move toward that vision. Responding to this initiative, Franklin County attorney Diane H. Esser and Thomas T. Merrigan, the First Justice of the Orange District Court, established a Franklin County Futures Lab Task Force Proposal to focus on the specific needs in Franklin County. Approved in December 1993 with Esser and Merrigan as chairs, the Task Force worked intensively with community partners, issuing a dozen recommendations on topics ranging from court house facilities to juvenile justice, substance abuse, Appropriate Dispute Resolution, and child care services. Although not all of the recommendations were implemented, the success of their model for court and community collaboration resulted in the creation on a ongoing position of Community Relations Coordinator in 1998. The project continues to evolve to meet community needs, but has continued to reflect the restorative justice values and principles engaged from the beginning.

The records of the Reinventing Justice initiative in Franklin County reflect an intensive, two-decade long effort to facilitate engagement between the courts and the community in western Massachusetts and build a vision for courts in the coming century. In addition to planning, administrative, and grant-seeking records, the collection includes significant documentation of process of engaging community members, and materials relating to their recommendations in restorative justice, substance abuse projects, facilities, and victim-offender mediation.

The Franklin/Hampshire Health Care Coalition is one of forty grassroots organizations in Massachusetts that allied to form the Massachusetts Campaign for Single-Payer Health Care (Mass-CARE) in 1995. Concerned about the inequities of the U.S. health care system, Mass-CARE has been a key sponsor of the Massachusetts Medicare for All act, which would establish a single payer health care system providing comprehensive health care for all residents of Massachusetts.

The records of the Franklin/Hampshire Health Care Coalition are a reflection of grassroots advocacy in Massachusetts for single payer health care. The collection includes minutes of meetings, background and informational materials, and other documents, including some materials from founding members Arky Markham and Alice Swift.

An author, scholar, and librarian, James Fraser had a voracious intellectual appetite that ranged from visual culture to the inter-war avant garde to Communist-era eastern Europe. Born April 30, 1934, Fraser earning his doctorate in Library Science at Columbia University and enjoyed a career of nearly 50 years in academic libraries. A specialist in international children’s literature, he and Sibylle von Holstein, his wife of 56 years, became known for building research collections at a number of university libraries, drawing upon their extraordinary knowledge of 20th century book arts, graphic design, photography, political ephemera, and East German culture, among other areas. Fraser was also an energetic exibitions curator, often based upon material he had collected. Jim Fraser died at home after a short illness on Nov. 25, 2013.

The product of two active and eclectic collectors, the Fraser collection contains over 1200 imprints on art and design in Communist-era eastern Europe, East Germany, 1960s radicalism, and other subjects, along with ephemera on radical movements in both the United States and Europe.

A scholar, linguist, and bibliophile, Jacob Freedman (1903-1986) served as Rabbi at Temple Beth-El in Fall River, Mass., during the 1930s and early 1940s, and later at congregations in Pittsfield, Springfield, and Stratford, Conn., among others.

The collection contains the published newsletter of Temple Beth-El from 1937-1941, as well as other published materials and a photograph of Rabbi Freedman.

A professor of English at UMass Amherst, James A. Freeman is a scholar of seventeenth century British literature who has compiled an impressively eclectic array of publications and research projects. Educated at Amherst College (AB 1956) and the University of Minnesota (PhD 1968), Freeman joined the faculty in the English Department at UMass shortly after completing his doctorate. He has published on topics ranging from Latin and Greek poets to Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Tennyson, James Agee, Donald Duck, 17th century regicides, and 1930s radio. He has also served as a regular contributor and editor for the Association for Gravestone Studies Quarterly.
The Freeman collection consists of many hundreds of cassette tapes of radio broadcasts from the 1930s through early 1950s, reflecting the culture of commercial radio during its golden age. The collection includes representatives of most of the major genres, including comedy, drama, suspense and mystery, soap operas, and westerns. There is some depth popular programs such as Amos and Andy, the Great Gildersleeve, Philip Marlowe, and Nero Wolfe, but the collection also includes less common and short-lived shows.

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

A professor of English at UMass Amherst, James A. Freeman is a scholar of seventeenth century British literature who has compiled an impressively eclectic array of publications and research projects. Educated at Amherst College (AB 1956) and the University of Minnesota (PhD 1968), Freeman joined the faculty in the English Department at UMass shortly after completing his doctorate. He has published on topics ranging from Latin and Greek poets to Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Tennyson, James Agee, Donald Duck, 17th century regicides, and 1930s radio. He has also served as a regular contributor and editor for the Association for Gravestone Studies Quarterly.

The Freeman Collection contains research materials, drafts, and images from Freeman’s varied research projects in the field of gravestone and cemetery studies.

U.S. Marshal of Massachusetts in charge of collecting the census for his judicial district in 1860. Includes petitions, letters of introduction and applications to him from prospective enumerators, list of assistants and their signed oaths, census returns, related correspondence, and certificates of receipt from the marshal’s office. Also contains letters from Joseph C.G. Kennedy to Freeman, an instruction book for assistants, the marshal’s oath, and a receipt for a set of returns from the Secretary of the Commonwealth.

Since the merger of the Boston Monthly Meeting with the Independent Cambridge Monthly during the second quarter of the twentieth century, the Society of Friends has expanded in the Boston area. Fresh Pond began as an allowed meeting under Cambridge Monthly in 1989 and was set off as a monthly meeting of its own in 1991. It has been under care of Salem Quarterly Meeting since its inception.

The records from Fresh Pond include a nearly complete set of minutes for the meeting’s first five years and a nearly comprehensive set of newsletters.

A voice of the radical working class during the Great Depression, Jack Conroy was the son of a union organizer, born and raised in the mining camps near Moberly, Mo. His novels The Disinherited (1933) and A World to Win (1935) were among the best known works of “proletarian” American fiction to appear in the 1930s.

The Conroy Collection includes a series of 24 letters from Jack Conroy to Lewis Fried, a professor of English at Kent State University and UMass PhD, along with a small number of letters by associates of Conroy, and a selection of publications associated with or including work by him. Of particular interest are Fried’s oral history interviews with Conroy (1971) and Sally Goodman (1978).

The present-day Friends Meeting at Cambridge began as an independent, informal, unprogrammed meeting for worship that met between 1899 and 1901, and then again beginning in 1911. After holding joint meetings with neighboring Boston Monthly Meeting starting in 1926, Cambridge became an official independent monthly meeting in 1937, and during the Quaker union of 1944, merged with Boston Monthly to create the new Friends Meeting at Cambridge.

Although records from Cambridge are beset with significant gaps, they nevertheless provide a rich opportunity for examining the growth of a monthly meeting in New England during the post-World War II era and the commitment shown by its members to creating social justice. The collection includes extensive records of the Peace and Social Concerns Committee (and related endeavors), documenting peace activism during the Cold War and Vietnam years, and initiatives to fight poverty and racial injustice.