Collections: mss

The son of a Revolutionary War veteran from Fairfield County, Conn., Reuben Nichols went to sea as teenager and spent a quarter of a century sailing the Atlantic aboard merchant ships and privateers. After rising to become master of the New York and Savannah packets Exact and Angelique in the 1830s, he retired to a life on shore near Bridgeport.

This vigorous account of a life on the antebellum seas runs Nichols’ childhood hardships through a series of adventures at sea in war and peace. An observant and effective writer, Nichols describes voyages to western and northern Europe, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and South America during and after the War of 1812. During a colorful career, he took part in the operations of warships and privateers, witnessed attempted mutinies and desertions, rescued the abolitionist John Hopper from a mob in Georgia, and was drawn into the struggles for colonial liberation. His experiences aboard the privateer Kemp and descriptions of Haiti, Cape Verde, Spain, Gibraltar, Turkey, and Argentina are particularly evocative.

Akerman in 1973

Nick Akerman, a UMass Amherst class of 1969 graduate, continued on to Harvard Law School and became a lawyer for the Department of Health Education and Welfare and the Federal Trade Commission. While at Harvard, he studied under James Vorenberg, who became a professor at Harvard Law School in 1962 and was the principal assistant to Archibald Cox in the Watergate Special Prosecutor’s Office. Vorenberg recruited Akerman to join the legal team and work under Cox, and later Leon Jaworski, who led the legal investigation into the Watergate affair. As a member of the team, Akerman led the Plumbers Task Force, which investigated the group that broke into the Watergate, burglarized Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office and attempted to “neutralize” him in 1972. He stayed in Washington until 1976, when he moved to New York. He became the Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York, where he prosecuted a wide array of white collar criminal matters, including bank frauds, bankruptcy frauds, stock frauds, complex financial frauds, environmental and tax crimes. He later founded Nick Akerman Law where he specialized in criminal and civil applications of the Racketeer and Corrupt Organizations Statute, the Economic Espionage Act, the federal Securities Laws, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and State Trade Secret and Restrictive Covenant Laws.

This small collection contains the material Akerman collected in the course of working for Cox and Jaworski on the Plumbers Task Force, as well as material collected by the larger Special Prosecution Force. It consists of legal memoranda, motions, subpoenas, and Akerman’s staff meeting notes. Also included are Akerman’s chron files from 1973-1975, reports, newspaper clippings, a reel to reel tape, and a Nixon campaign photo.

Established in 1983 and published twice a year at UMass Amherst with the support of Five Colleges, Inc., Nineteenth Century Theatre offered scholarly, critical, and documentary coverage of a broad range of subjects. Issues of the journal contained essays, documents, book reviews, bibliographical studies, and analyses of archival holdings.

The records of the journal include essays and reviews submitted for publication, correspondence, and published issues.

Naomi Nir spent much of her life exploring the deep inner workings of the self through writing, painting, drawing, studying the writings of mystics, and exploring — both as subject and scholar — Jungian analysis and philosophy. Nir was born in Manchester, England in 1917. Her father, Shmuel (Samuel) Tolkowsky, was an agronomist working in Palestine and her mother, Hannah, was the daughter of a prominent Zionist and philanthropist. Nir lived in Tel Aviv and then Jerusalem for her entire life, married folklorist and anthropologist Raphael Patai in 1940, and then ended the marriage in 1948. That same year, Nir sought out Jungian analysis with Erich Neumann, a German psychologist and student of Carl Jung, who had moved to Palestine in 1934. Nir’s formal analysis with Neumann was brief, but the two maintained an intensive correspondence and relationship for several years following. Between 1953 and 1954, Nir was in Switzerland at the C. G. Jung Institute, where she underwent analysis with Emma Jung (wife of Carl Jung). Nir then returned to Israel, where she worked assembling pottery from archaeological digs and did play therapy with troubled children. Nir died in Jerusalem in 2004.

The Naomi Nir Papers contain Nir’s original journals spanning 1948-1973, in her original handwriting and also as a typescript version, totaling over 2,600 pages in length. The journals, or “Notes” as she called them, explore Nir’s journey of psychological and spiritual self-reflection in the context of and following a Jungian analysis with Erich Neumann, and provide an intimate look at the world and players of Jungian society and her contentious relationship with Jungian thought. The collection also includes more than one hundred letters written to Nir by Neumann, as well as a small group of Neumann’s writings and lectures collected by Nir. In addition, there are multiple works of art in the form of pastel and charcoal drawings created by Nir during periods of intense self-reflection.

David F. Noble was a critical and highly influential historian of technology, science, and education, writing from a strong leftist perspective. Receiving his doctorate at the University of Rochester, Noble began his academic career at MIT. His first book, America By Design (1977), received strong reviews for its critique of the corporate control of science and technology, but proved too radical for MIT, which denied him tenure despite strong support from his peers. A stint at the Smithsonian followed, but ended similarly, and he continued to face opposition in his career for his radicalism and persistence. After several years at Drexel (1986-1994), Noble landed at York University, where he remained committed to a range of social justice issues, including opposition to the corporatization of universities. Among his major works Forces of Production (1984), A World Without Women (1992), The Religion of Technology (1997), Digital Diploma Mills (2001), and Beyond the Promised Land (2005). Noble died of complications of pneumonia in December 2010, and was survived by his wife Sarah Dopp and three daughters.

The challenges of academic freedom and corporate influence that Noble confronted throughout his career, and his trenchant analysis of technology, science, and religion in contemporary culture, form the core of this collection. Although the files relating to his first book were mostly lost, each of his later books is well represented, accompanied by general correspondence, documentation of his lawsuits against his employers, and selective public talks and publications. Noble’s time at York is particularly well documented, including content relating to his principled stand against grading students.

In the late 1920s, the sociologist and prisoner reformer Howard Belding Gill proposed building a “model community prison” at Norfolk, Mass., that would represent a radical new approach to dealing with crime and punishment. Integrating social work and sociological theory into the workings of the prison system, Gill reasoned that it would be possible to diagnose and treat the root problems that led to crime and redirect inmates toward constructive behaviors. Built by inmates themselves, the prison opened in 1932, but with opponents decrying the experiment as a “country club” that coddled prisoners, Gill was forced from the superintendency within just two years.

The collection consists of several drafts of a manuscript by a supporter of Gill’s, Thomas O’Connor, that was intended for publication in The Survey magazine, along with associated correspondence and photographs. Although The Survey’s editor, Arthur Kellogg, was sympathetic enough to pass through several drafts and seek opinions widely, the manuscript appears to have been rejected so as not to cause the governor undue political problems.

Judy Norsigian is a prominent advocate for women’s reproductive health and was a co-founder of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, better known by its later and the title of its best-known book, Our Bodies, Ourselves. Editor of each of the nine editions of the book and executive director of the collective from 2001 to 2015, Norsigian is an important public intellectual on women’s health issues and has served on numerous boards and advisory groups relating to reproductive health, contraception, and medical research.

Consisting primarily of the sort of ephemeral political literature that abounded in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Norsigian collection offers insight into the feminist movement and the early milieu of Our Bodies, Ourselves. Many of the publications are devoted to issues in contemporary feminism or pertain to women’s conferences, however several (especially those published by the New England Free Press) take on other political and social movements.

In the years after it separated from Bridegwater in 1821, North Bridgewater emerged as a center of manufacturing. During the industrial boom years of the mid-nineteenth century, it grew into the largest producer of shoes and boots in the nation, boasting 97 factories by the end of the century. In 1874, the town changed to its current name, Brockton, and it was incorporated as a city seven years later.

Nearly two thirds of this town treasurer’s account book from North Bridgewater (later Brockton), Massachusetts, is devoted to a monthly accounting of money paid to the families of Civil War volunteers, beginning in April 1861 and carrying through 1881, made mostly by town treasurer R.P. Kingman; accounts of school district expenses and revenues for the years 1858 to 1869, for the 14 school districts in North Bridgewater (teacher salaries, supplies, and accounts with textbook publishers such as Harper & Bros. and Heath & Co.); and listings of salaries paid town officers, including the Superintendent of Streets, Overseer of the Poor, city clerk, city treasurer, and the Police Department.

The North Center School District in Hatfield, Massachusetts, was established in 1812, when the town divided into three school districts.

The collection consists of seventeen handwritten documents including financial records, a report and recipes relating to the North Center School District in Hatfield, Massachusetts, representing the period from 1818 to 1833. While not a comprehensive collection, the items nonetheless offer insight into education at the turn of the century, especially the sorts of expenses accrued in maintaining a small town schoolhouse.

Responding to a concern expressed in the New England Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends in 1971, Quakers in eastern Massachusetts set out to create an intentional Quakerly community for the care of elder Friends. The first meeting for worship took place in 1977, with the first residents moving in to Friends Crossing in 1979, leading to recognition of North Easton as a monthly meeting under Rhode Island-Smithfield Quarter in 1980. In the following years, however, the reduction in numbers of older members and decline in attenders, led to the decision in 1994 to lay down the meeting.

The records of North Easton Monthly Meeting document the short career of a meeting built around a planned Quaker intentional community. The relatively complete set of minutes is accompanied by a mixed, but useful body of financial records documenting the meeting’s dissolution.