Collections: mss

Eileen McCarthy Rakouskas is a personal historian and founder of Mosaic Memoirs, a service that assists people in recording, editing, and producing oral histories, memoirs, and other family stories. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College and Holyoke Community College, she has been particularly interested in recording “ordinary lives” and lives connected with social justice struggles.

On May 17, 2004, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health that it was unconstitutional to prohibit same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. On the first day of legalized same-sex marriage, Rakouskas conducted interviews with couples waiting in line to apply for marriage licenses, city clerks, and others. Her collection also includes an assortment of other materials documenting the first day of full marriage equality.

Select materials in this collection are restricted; consult an archivist for more information.

Martha Ramsey is the author of Where I Stopped, a memoir of rape in adolescence, and Blood Stories, a book of poems. Ramsey grew up in Flemington, New Jersey, a farming community 65 miles southwest of New York City. She had unusually creative, bohemian-minded, arts-oriented parents; her father was a pioneering jazz historian; both became alcoholics. She was a precociously intelligent child and was skipped two grades at her local elementary school; she escaped from the resulting loneliness and social insecurity into books and nature. She was happier as a day student at Solebury School, a progressive high school nearby in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. On a summer day in 1968, at age 13, while she was walking her bike up a back road near her home, she was attacked and raped by a 28-year-old man, a stranger. She insisted that her parents call the police immediately, “so it won’t happen to anyone else.” Her parents soon heard from neighbors that before Martha, the rapist had “molested other girls.” She endured a confrontation with him at the police barracks and giving testimony at the trial that resulted in his conviction and sentence of 15 years. Five years later she also endured the shock of learning on a visit home from college that he had, while released on parole, sexually assaulted and murdered a 16-year-old girl near the girl’s family’s farm, on the anniversary of the rape. This time he was sentenced to life. Where I Stopped, written when Ramsey was in her thirties, tells this story in detail and follows her attempts to understand what had happened to her and how it was affecting her over the years as she grew into adulthood, pursued her calling as a poet, and married. The memoir also chronicles her decision to return to the place where she grew up to speak with people who remembered the crime and who had participated in the trial and to unearth the police and trial records—all part of her effort to come to terms with what she remembered.

A powerful collection documenting the writing of her memoir, Where I Stopped, Ramsey’s papers include audio recordings of statements she and others made to the police shortly after her rape; a transcript of the trial; Ramsey’s notes from interviews she conducted with individuals who remembered the crime; and drafts of her memoir, containing comments from early readers and material cut from the final version. Ramsey’s unpublished writings, journals, and correspondence document her intellectual and emotional life from her teenage years forward, including the drafts of all her published and unpublished poems. Family papers focus on the author’s father, Frederic Ramsey, a noted jazz historian; they include correspondence, photographs, and the unpublished autobiography of Ethel Ramsey (1884–1965)—textile designer, painter, and participant in the artists’ colony in New Hope, Pennsylvania—that contains acerbic discussion of the struggles of women artists in the late nineteenth century and later.

A dry goods merchant and chair maker in Erving, Massachusetts, Joseph Rankin dealt in a variety of goods from Boston to Hartford, selling chairs as far away as New York City and Chicago. Rankin’s store supplied the essentials: produce, hardware, news, and gossip.

This collection contains an assortment of correspondence and receipts documenting the nature of business in small town Massachusetts, with small glimpses of the growth of the furniture trade in Franklin County.

Born into a Jewish family in the town of Buzau, Romania, the endocrinologist and psychopathologist Ionel Florian Rapaport entered the University of Paris in 1937 to study under the eminent psychologists Maxime Laignel-Lavastine and Charles Blondel. Surviving the war by posing as a Christian, he completed a dissertation on ritual castration, Les Faits de castration rituelle, essai sur les formes pathologiques de la conscience collective (1945), which was published three years later as Introduction à la psychopathologie collective : la secte mystique des Skoptzy. In 1953, Rapaport emigrated to the United States and joined the faculty at the Psychiatric Institute of the University of Wisconsin, where he became noted for research into the social aspects of mental disorders and juvenile delinquency. It was there in 1956, that he discovered a statistical correlation between the incidence of Down Syndrome and exposure to fluorides, a study that became widely cited by opponents of fluoridation of the water supply and widely criticized by proponents. Rapaport died of cancer in 1972.

The Rapaport Papers contain a large quantity of raw data, research notes and correspondence relating to over two decades of research into mental disorders, centered largely upon his study of the link between Down Syndrome and fluoridation. Due to the potential sensitivities of some material in the collection, researchers must agree not to reveal the names of any patients before gaining access.

The independent filmmaker Abraham Ravett has taught film and video at Hampshire College since 1979. Born in Poland in 1947 and raised in Israel, Ravett emigrated to the United States with his family in 1955. Since earning his BFA and MFA in Filmmaking and Photography, he has won wide recognition for his work, receiving major grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation, among other organizations, and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. His films have been screened internationally and have earned Top Prize at the Viennale 2000, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Onion City Film/Video Festival.

This small collection contains raw footage on open-reel videotape shot by Ravett and two dvds documenting local communities in eastern Massachusetts: the North End, Boston (1977-1978) and Haverhill High School (1978-1979), the latter taken while artist in residence.

Herman Edgar Ray, son of Fred Jackson Ray and Mabel Cosella Merriam Ray, was born in Westminster, Massachusetts on May 28, 1911. Herman Edgar married Anita Crabtree on May 4, 1934 in Gardner, Massachusetts. The family remained in the area throughout the 1950s as indicated by their correspondence.

The collection consists primarily of family photographs spanning three identifiable generations of the Ray family, and contains photograph albums, formal portraits, and miscellaneous photographs. Additional material includes postcards, correspondence, and hand-made greeting cards. The materials document the childhood of Herman Edgar Ray. His extended family includes: Mr. and Mrs. Edwin Ray, Mr. and Mrs. Hiram Ray, Ray Fenno, Mary Emergene Fenno, Mr.and Mrs. Charles A. Smith, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Davis, Helen Gates, Mary Russell, and Eleanor Howe.

Founded in 1935, the Northeast Dairy Conference was “an association of more than 40 organizations of dairy producers in thirteen states from Maine to West Virginia.” Ranging from individual farmers and cooperatives to state-level departments of agriculture and milk control boards,” the NDC represented the interests of “hundreds of dairy plants and… thousands of workers,” and worked to ensure the success of the “principle agricultural industry in the Northeast.”

The Regional Dairy Marketing Program collection contains meeting proceedings, annuals reports, research project statements, and detailed accounts of the Northeast Dairy Conference’s Cooperative Regional Projects from 1946 to 1960.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, the Regional Geometry Institute held at the Five Colleges in 1991 included a series of talks by noted mathematicians exploring the shape of space and related topics.

The videotapes in this collection were recorded at the Regional Geometry Institute organized by Five Colleges mathematics faculty and convened at Mount Holyoke in July 1991. The Institute sponsored a dozen speakers on the shape of space and related topics, most giving more than one lecture.

Born in Germany in 1888, Henry Gustave Reinsch became an American citizen in 1912, serving in the military during the First World War, marrying an American girl, and starting a family. In 1942, however, two FBI agents showed up at Reinsch’s office, and a year later, Reinsch’s citizenship was revoked when he was accused by the U.S. government of living a double life — publicly loyal to America, privately loyal to Germany. Reinsch appealed the ruling to the Ninth Circuit Court and won. His citizenship was reinstated in 1945.

The Reinsch Papers contains newspaper clippings, personal and business correspondence, and official documents pertaining to both citizenship trials, that tell of uncommon wartime experiences.

Max C. Rheinberger, Jr., 1968

Named Handicapped American of the Year in 1968, Max C. Rheinberger, Jr., worked as a community leader to uplift those with disabilities by bringing awareness to and actively deconstructing barriers to access. Rheinberger himself was a quadriplegic as a result of contracting polio in 1952. During rehabilitation he completed a degree in accounting before embarking on a lifelong career as a businessman and distinguished figure in his community.

Beginning with the founding of his first business in 1956, Rheinberger worked to empower those with disabilities by providing rehabilitative training for those who were otherwise deemed “unemployable.” He was involved in various civic organizations, including Duluth’s City Council, Duluth’s Chamber of Commerce, Minnesota’s Rehabilitation Association, and the Executive Board of the National President’s Committee on Employment of the Handicapped. His efforts and role as a leader brought him recognition as a disability rights figure at both a local and national level.

The collection includes newspaper clippings, certificates and awards, publications, correspondence, and a scrapbook, detailing his work in disability rights activism as well as his personal endeavors.