Collections: mss

Frank “Nick” Newth was born in Lynn, Mass., on Oct. 9, 1895, the son of shoe cutter Charles H. Newth and his wife Mary Hobart Brackett. A talented baseball player in high school, Newth used his sport connections to become a manager, and eventually owner, of a billiard parlor. On October 5, 1917, however, he was drafted for service in the First World War an deployed to France with the Quartermaster Corps in January 1918. Unusually, for most of his service, Newth was posted in northwestern France (Abbeville, Amiens, Rouen) as a disbursement officer for American troops serving with the British Expeditionary Force an then disbursing to the wounded in base hospitals. He was promoted to Corporal in May 1918, and ended his overseas service in May 1919 as a Sergeant working with the Quartermaster’s financial unit. After returning home, Newth married his longtime sweetheart Letitia “Letty” Crane, with whom he raised a family of four. He worked as proprietor of the New Buick Billiard Hall until 1928, when he opened a successful business selling rubber tires in southern New England. Newth died on May 29, 1979, and is buried in the Forest Chapel Cemetery in Barrington, R.I.

The Newth collection consists of many dozens of letters written between Frank Newth and his fiancee Letty and other members of his family back home in Lynn, Mass., while his served with the Quartermaster Corps in the First World War. Although his letters are subject to the censorship typical of that war, Newth was an excellent and observant writer and because often served near the front, but in a support role, he had time and energy to write. His affection for Letty (and hers for him) come through in every letter, but Newth also discusses his duties in the service, recreation and travel, and the sights and people of France. The collection also includes a fine letter describing the relief after the Armistice went into effect; a brief, but outstanding typed diary kept during the early months of his overseas service; and a small handful of pamphlets, keepsakes, and official papers.

A farmer living in the Quabbin region, Levi Newton spent most of his life within a few miles of the adjoining towns of North Dana and New Salem. Born in 1830, Newton was married three times and raised two sons and a daughter. He died in New Salem in 1919.

Written at a time when his son Willie was living at home and his wife Persis was struggling with her health, Levi Newton’s pocket diary is a terse record of the daily life of a farmer in the great Quabbin region. Little more than a sentence or two in length, each entry makes quick note of the weather, travel, and Levi’s and Willie’s activities for the day, but there are relatively frequent references to the ailments and ultimate death of Persis and occasional notes on the anniversaries of the death of family members. The Newtons raised wheat, potatoes, cattle, hay, and oats on their farm and occasionally record hauling logs and other miscellaneous work.

A cartwright from Cohasset, Massachusetts. Account book includes the types of activities and services Ambrose Nichols performed (working on wagons, wheels, sleds and carts, mending roofs, plowing, raking) and a few entries recording the means by which debts were paid.

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.