Collections: mss

Originating in 1991, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) was established “to create a global network for book historians working in a broad range of scholarly disciplines.” With more than 1,000 members, research interests include the composition and reception of books as well as their survival and transformation over time.

Records cover the earliest days of the organization’s development, including founding documents, and document a variety of their activities from hosting conferences and publishing a newsletter to promoting scholarship.

Graduating from Harvard in the thick of the Great Depression, Arvo A. Solander worked as a civil and sanitary engineer for a variety of state and federal agencies, including the Civil Works Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps. During the 1930s, as opportunity arose, he filled positions as a road engineer, in the design and construction of water and sewage plants, in pollution control, as a safety engineer in the shellfish industry, and in mosquito control, taking jobs throughout Massachusetts and as far away as Tennessee. After using his talents as an officer in the Sanitary Corps during the Second World War, based primarily in Arkansas, Solander returned home to Massachusetts and opened a private engineering office in South Hadley. He worked as a civil engineer and surveyor until his death in January 1976.
The Arvo Solander Papers consists of twenty-four bound volumes documenting thirty years of varied work as an engineer, including his contributions to the construction of the Quabbin Reservoir. Within the bound volumes are a wide range of reports, typescripts, sketches and diagrams, graphs, contracts and design specifications, photographs, and postcards.

A scholar of labor studies and activist, José Soler was born in New York City to a Dominican mother and Puerto Rican father and has been an activist in the cause of Puerto Rican independence and human rights since the 1970s. While a student at the University of New Mexico (BA 1972), Soler emerged as a leader in the Chicano rights organization, the Brown Berets, and while living in Puerto Rico in the late 1970s, he joined the Puerto Rican Socialist Party. Soler has subsequently worked in the labor movement as a shop steward, union organizer with UAW District 65, and labor journalist. As a committed Marxist and prolific writer and editor, he has taken part in causes ranging from anti-imperialist work in the Caribbean and Central America to the anti-apartheid struggle, and he has served on the Executive Board of the US Peace Council. From 1993 until his retirement in 2015, Soler worked as Director of the Arnold M. Dubin Labor Education Center at UMass Dartmouth where he has continued to work on behalf of public education and human rights and national self-determination.
The Soler Papers chronicle over forty years of a life-long activist’s interests and participation in left-wing political, labor, and social justice movements. There is a particular focus on topics relating to socialism and the pro-independence movement in Puerto Rico, anti-imperialist movements in South and Central America and Africa, and issues affecting Puerto Rican and Hispanic workers in the United States, New England, and the New York City area. Published and promotional materials such as periodicals, magazines, newsletters, and pamphlets make up the bulk of the collection, with extensive coverage of the concerns of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party (Partido Socialista Puertorriqueño, PSP), the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), as well as New Jersey chapters of the unions Communications Workers of America (CWA) and District 65, which eventually joined the International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace, and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW). An additional seven boxes were added to the collection in June 2016, which remain unprocessed. The new materials offer additional documentation from the Dubin Labor Education Center and Soler’s work and interests in education (testing, privatization, and unions), labor, Marxist-Leninism, and various events in the United States and Latin America.

Mark Sommer, with Zetta, the first newborn goat at the Sommer homestead in northern CA, May 1985

Mark Sommer is an explorer, storyteller, and award-winning public radio and print journalist focused on advocacy and narratives of social, political, and environmental change and positive action. In Washington, D.C., Sommer found himself on hand for some of the 1960s pivotal moments, where he was involved with the Liberation News Service and the New Left think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies. Sommer moved to California in 1969 to explore the counterculture, spending several years journeying – spiritually, psychedelically, and physically between communes, farms, and wilderness homesteads along the western coast – before he and his wife built a self-reliant organic homestead in the deep woods of northern CA, where they lived from the 1970s to the 1990s. The resilience of nature deeply impacted Sommer’s outlook and work as a writer and journalist, driving his interest in the human capacity for overcoming adversity. Sommer founded and directed the Mainstream Media Project, a nonprofit media placement service scheduling leading edge thinkers and social innovators for extensive radio interviews, and Sommer served as host and executive producer of the internationally syndicated and award winning, one-hour weekly radio program, A World of Possibilities. Sommer is the author of three books (Beyond the Bomb, The Conquest of War, and Living in Freedom), and hundreds of op-eds in major newspapers worldwide. Current projects include short and movie length videos crafted from his photographs, films, interviews, and experiences.

Chronicling over five decades of creative and journalistic output of a life-long explorer and progressive advocate, the Mark Sommer Papers are an extensive collection, covering Sommer’s entire career and personal life from the late 1960s to the present. Writings include personal and multiple travel journals (including a unique trip to North Vietnam in 1968), correspondence, student essays, op-eds, articles, project and grant plans, memoirs, and book manuscripts. Additional journals exist in audio format, along with radio interviews where Sommer served as a guest. Slides, photographs, and movies cover Sommer’s family and home life to his wide-ranging travels and interests. Some main topics of coverage include foreign policy and international politics, progressivism, peace and conflict studies, the anti-nuclear and disarmament movements, wilderness and back-to-the-land experiences, and later in life fatherhood. Materials from Mainstream Media Project have been separated into the Mainstream Media Project Records.

Originating as an independent worship group in Monterey, Mass., in about 1952, the South Berkshire Friends Meeting came under the auspices of the Middle Connecticut Valley Monthly Meeting in 1955 as the Great Barrington Worship Group. It changed name to Gould Farm in 1962, and then to Berkshire in 1971 before setting off formally from the Mount Toby Monthly Meeting in 1984.

This small collection contains minutes and newsletters of the meeting since it was organized as a monthly in 1984.

The South Kingstown Monthly Meeting of the Society of Friends was the home meeting of John Wilbur and as such, the epicenter of the Wilburite separation of 1845. A part of Rhode Island Quarter, the meeting became a locus for the Wilburite separation of 1845 when the membership at South Kingstown rebuffed efforts to discipline Wilbur. After being suspended from 1842 to 1847, the Gurneyite South Kingstown Monthly Meeting was laid down in 1899.

The records of South Kingstown Monthly Meeting contain an extensive set of minutes, though sparse in the post-separation years, along with vital records, records of meeting disciplinary cases, certificates of manumission for people enslaved by members of the meeting, and miscellaneous other content.

As the home of John Wilbur, South Kingstown Monthly Meeting was at the epicenter of the Separation of 1845 within the New England Yearly Meeting of Friends. The South Kingstown Monthly Meeting (Wilburite) was formed in 1845 from members of South Kingstown and Greenwich Monthly Meetings and placed under the care of Rhode Island Quarterly Meeting. It was one of only three Wilburite monthly meetings to survive through the unification of 1945, when it became Westerly Monthly Meeting.

The relative success of South Kingstown Monthly Meeting (Wilburite) did not parlay into a large body of records. The collection contains one volume each of official minutes from the men’s and women’s meetings, two slender volumes from the Select Preparative Meeting, a letterbook, and a slender volume of vital records.

The Friends Monthly Meeting at South Starksboro, Vermont, began as Creek Allowed Meeting, and has had a complex organizational history. It became part of New England Yearly Meeting in 1975, and gained status as a monthly meeting for the second time in 1996, operating under Northwest Quarter.

The records of South Starksboro Monthly Meeting date from the period starting shortly before it returned to monthly status in 1982. They consist of minutes of meetings (sparse for later years) and state of the meeting reports, along with a somewhat incomplete run of newsletter.

The Southeast Asia Collection highlights the regional wars from the 1970s to the 1980s, including a series on Southeast Asian refugees in America, along with materials on regional economic development, especially in the Mekong River Basin. The collection contains hundreds of reports on agricultural and industrial projects in the region, examining everything from the impact of electrification on village life in Thailand to a description of a Soviet-built hospital in Cambodia in 1961, to an assessment of herbicide in Vietnam in 1971.

Collected primarily by Joel Halpern and James Hafner, the collection includes background, field, and situation reports by U.S. Operations Missions and U.S. Agency for International Development; reports, publications, statistics, and background information from other U.S. government agencies, governments of Laos and Thailand, and the United Nations; correspondence, reports, and reference materials of nongovernmental organizations; reports and essays by individuals about Southeast Asia; news releases and newspapers; published and unpublished bibliographies; and interviews with U.S. military personnel. Most material comes from governmental and organizational sources, but there are papers by, and debriefs of, numerous individuals.

The Southern Maine Monthly Meeting (Falmouth Quarter) is a small, unprogrammed Quaker meeting that gathers in Friends’ homes twice monthly in York County. Established as an independent worship group in 1980 under Falmouth Quarterly, the meeting achieved monthly status as Waterboro Monthly Meeting two years later. With changes in membership in 2005, and the departure of some longtime supporters, they changed name to Southern Maine Monthly Meeting to reflect the “broader range of the various members and attenders.”

The records of Southern Maine Monthly are comprised of a relatively complete set of minutes and state of the society reports.