Collections: mss

Restricted arbitration and grievance files for individual employees organized under Local 213 of the IUE in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Local chapters of the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers representing workers in Connecticut. Records document a full range of union activities from elections and contract negotiations to arbitration and grievances. Also includes some union realia such as button, t-shirts, and bumper stickers.

Union that represented workers at the American Bosch plant in Springfield, Massachusetts, affiliated with the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers after 1949.

Records include by-laws, minutes of the Executive Board, General Council, and Membership meetings, correspondence, membership reports, grievance and arbitration records, contract negotiation proposals and counter-proposals, strike materials, and publications documenting the administration, activities, and membership of Local 206. Effects of changing national economy and international trade on workers and union affairs, through time, are evident.

Local chapter of the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers that represented workers at the Chapman Valve Manufacturing Company of Indian Orchard, Massachusetts. Records include detailed minute books of general and executive board meetings as well as several ledgers that reflect the activities of the credit union and the Chapman Valve Athletic Association.

After 1975 was designated as the first International Women’s Year by the United Nations, later extended to a decade, President Carter created a National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year. A national women’s conference was proposed and funded by the U.S.Congress, the first and only time the federal government funded a nationwide women’s conference. A series of state meetings were held throughout 1977 to elect delegates to the national conference and to identify goals for improving the status of women over the next decade.

This collection consists of state reports prepared and submitted to the National Commission for the Observance of International Women’s Year. Reports include details about the election of national delegates, topics of workshops held at the meetings, and resolutions adopted by individual states.

Obscure in origin, the Ireland Lyceum appears to have been a fairly typical antebellum debating society, organized as an intellectually stimulating social activity for the benefit of its members. Meeting regularly, probably in the city of Holyoke, members formally debated a pre-assigned topic such as “Has America arrived at the zenith of her glory” (decided in the negative) or “are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness inalienable rights,” after which the members might hear an address.

A mangled, fragmentary echo of its former self, the Constitution, by-laws, and regular proceedings of the Ireland Lyceum contains the slender records of a typical antebellum men’s debating society. The volume was later used as a scrapbook with newspaper clippings covering the pages, however the clippings have been removed from the first several pages by a conservator, revealing some of the original content.

The Irma McClaurin Black Feminist Archive (BFA) is an archival home for Black women and their allies. Founded by Dr. Irma McClaurin, Black feminist anthropologist, academic administrator, award-winning poet and author, past president of Shaw University and leader in higher education, the BFA seeks to identify Black women from all walks of life who are artists, activists, and academics but may not be well known, and document their wide array of contributions at many levels: community, state, national, and global. In addition to being an ongoing resource for academic and community researchers, the BFA also aims to be a training center, where Black archivists can actively participate in their own history and uplift and protect the endangered legacy of Black women. Articles about Dr. McClaurin and the BFA have appeared in the Massachusetts Daily Collegian, UMass Magazine and on the the Black Presence website. Her article, “Black Women, Visible and Heard,” published in UMass Magazine was highlighted when the publication received the Gold level CASE award in 2022.

The BFA is an umbrella collection, made up of a growing and diverse group of collections documenting Black women, allies, movements, and organizations. Highlights include the papers of renown anthropologists Sheila Walker and Carolyn Martin Shaw; Belizean writer Zee Edgell; activist and educator Cheryl Evans, who founded the Black Pioneers Project documenting the experience of Black students at UMass Amherst during the late 1960s; Lawrence (Larry) Paros, a UMass alum and forerunner of the Alternative Education movement in America, past director of the 1968 Yale Summer High School (YSHS); and the papers of Dr. Irma McClaurin, BFA founder, which include her photographs of iconic Black figures. The development of the BFA has been supported by two grants from the Wenner Gren Foundation: The Historical Archive Grant and The Global Initiative Grant (GIG) for “The Black Feminist Archive Pandemic Preservation Project of Black Women Practicing Anthropologists” project

Collections include:

• Zee Edgell Papers
• Cheryl Evans Papers
• Irma McClaurin Collection
• Lawrence Paros Papers
• Carolyn Martin Shaw Papers
• Audrey Smedley Papers
• Sheila Walker Papers
• Mae Upperman Collection
• Deborah Johnson-Simon Papers
• Roderick and Melanie Bush Papers
• Edith Renfrow Smith Papers

Janice M. Irvine, professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is known for her research in the areas of social knowledge production, culture, politics, and sexuality studies. She earned her Ph.D. from Brandeis University, and an MPH in biostatistics and epidemiology from Boston University. She has received two Fulbright Scholarships; a Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America Oral History Grant; a Rockefeller Fellowship at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at CUNY; and an award for Career Achievement and Distinguished Scholarship by the Sexualities Section of the American Sociological Association. Irvine’s books include Talk About Sex: How Sex Ed Battles Helped Ignite the Right; Marginal People in Deviant Places: Ethnography, Difference, and the Challenge to Scientific Racism; and Disorders of Desire: Sexuality and Gender in Modern American Sexology. Irvine is also the author of numerous articles, and editor or coeditor of several volumes of essays.

The Janice M. Irvine Oral History Collection consists of oral histories conducted by Irvine over the course of more than a decade. Including interviews that were part of the research for her book Marginal People in Deviant Places, the collection also emphasizes experiences of people researching, using, or prescribing psychedelics for medical, psychological, spiritual, or mystical purposes, as well as individuals and groups engaged in or welcoming difference and creating or inhabiting alternative spaces. Interviews will go online as the files and metadata are prepared.

Robert A. Irwin is an activist and educator living in Massachusetts. He first became active in social change work with Movement for a New Society (1971-1988), and went on to work with such organizations as the Exploratory Project on the Conditions of Peace (ExPro), and New England War Tax Resistance, and with organizers and activists such as Gene Sharp, Randy Kehler, Elise Boulding, Randy Forsberg, Robert Jay Lifton, and George Lakey. He was an active collector of published materials from these movements. Irwin studied philosophy at Princeton University and Antioch College, and earned a Ph.D. in sociology at Brandeis University. He has taught at Tufts University, Brandeis, College of the Holy Cross, and, for over twenty years, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Writing and Communication Center. In addition to his activism and collecting, Irwin has authored resources on coalition building, nonviolence, and peace, including his book Building a Peace System (1989); a book chapter condensing his book in Mobilizing Democracy (1991), and with Gordon Faison “Why Nonviolence?,” a special Dandelion Issue issued by Movement for a New Society.

The Robert A. Irwin Periodicals Collection consists of publications and periodicals produced by activists and movements for social justice. The collection’s topic area is broad, but it has especially strong representation from movements engaged in peace work, nonviolence, politics, radicalism, socialism, and feminism. Titles with larger runs include WIN (subtitled “Peace and Freedom through Nonviolent Action,”) Liberation, Monthly Review, Our Generation, Peace Work, Radical America, Seven Days, Socialist Revolution, and Telos, among others. The collection also includes Irwin’s own book and other publications.

A member of the American Expeditionary Force during the First World War, Charles Edward Jackson was the son of Irish immigrants and a native of Northampton, Massachusetts. Drafted into the 76th (Liberty Bell) Division and assigned to the 301st Ammunition Train of the 151st Field Artillery Brigade, he served in France for a full year beginning in June 1918, seeing front line duty only in the last few days of the war. After the Armistice, he was reassigned to a classification camp in central France where he helped process American soldiers heading home. After making his back in June 1919, he worked as a clerk in a hardware store in Northampton until his death in 1930.

Written entirely while in the military service, Charles Jackson’s letters describe his exploits during the First World War. An optimist, strong Catholic, and good soldier, Jackson describes his year overseas, from mustering at Camp Devens through life in an ammunition train and the long post-war months spent on duty in a classification camp in central France. Although nearly devoid of actual battle content due to the role his unit played and the reach of censorship, Jackson’s letters are descriptive and entertaining, describing day to day life, the late offensives of the war, the influenza epidemic and Armistice, and his growing sense of impatience while awaiting demobilization.