Collections: N

During the early twentieth century, the library at the Moses Brown School (formerly the Friends Boarding School) became an informal repository for Quaker manuscripts reflecting the history and work of the Society of Friends. Most of these materials were later transferred for custody to the school’s governing body, the New England Yearly Meeting of Friends.

This miscellaneous assortment of letters was apparently set aside by the staff at the Moses Brown School due to their historical content and preserved in the “vault.” Many of the letters appear to have been retained as good examples of Quaker expression of family and friendly bonds or as documentation about significant periods in Quaker history, particularly the Gurneyite-Wilburite controversy of the 1840s, and several touch on Quaker involvement in the antislavery and peace movements. Of special note are four interesting letters from the Quaker minister and social reformer, Elizabeth Comstock, written during and just after the Civil War; a series of nine lengthy letters from a visiting English minister Isaac Stephenson, traveling through New England meetings; a substantial series of letters from prominent Friend Samuel Boyd Tobey; and three letters from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Sarah F. Tobey regarding attempts to connect Stowe with Alexander T. Stewart in hopes of raising funds for her plans for the education of women.

Doctrinal and cultural disputes roiled the Society of Friends in the United States during the early nineteenth century. While evangelical influence had grown within the majority of meetings in New England since at least the 1820s, resistance to the innovations grew too, culminating in a major separation of meetings in 1844 and 1845. A small, but significant portion of Friends coalesced around a Rhode Island Quaker minister, John Wilbur, a strong critic of the evangelical star Joseph John Gurney, to form a separate New England Yearly Meeting of Friends (Wilburite) in 1845. Although most Wilburite monthly meetings were relatively small and short-lived, three persisted, reuniting with the “larger body” of New England Quakerism in 1945.

The records of the Wilburite New England Yearly Meeting consist of a nearly comprehensive set of minutes, records of ministers and elders, meetings for suffering, and epistles. The records are particularly strong for the period of division in the 1840s and reunion in the 1930s and 1940s. The records of Wilburite quarterly and monthly meetings are described separately.

The Friends meeting in New Haven, Conn., can be traced back to at least 1935, when a worship group there became affiliated with the independent Connectict Valley Association of Friends. With the general reunification of New England Friends in 1944, the Association became the Connecticut Valley Quarterly Meeting, and New Haven becoming a monthly, within the New England Yearly Meeting.

The records of New Haven Monthly Meeting contain a thorough set of minutes from 1940-2010, along with a small stretch of minutes from the worship group in Old Saybrook (1955).

A monthly Quaker meeting affiliated with Connecticut Valley Quarter, New London Friends Meeting began in about 1964, when Hobart Mitchell moved to the area to join the faculty at Mitchell College and gathered together a small cadre of Friends to create an independent worship group. New London Friends were granted status as a monthly meeting in 1966, and secured a meetinghouse of their own in 1985.

The records of New London Friends Meeting consist of an incomplete set of minutes from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s.

A town at the eastern periphery of Franklin County, Mass., New Salem was incorporated in 1753 and has never strayed far from its rural roots. In the 1840s, agriculture supplied much of the town’s work, supplemented by lumbering, hide tanning, and a cottage industry in palm-leaf hats, of which over 79,000 were manufactured in 1837 alone.

Although this daybook covers only a brief span of four years, it offers a fascinating glimpse into the vibrancy of a country store in antebellum Western Massachusetts. The store’s owner is not recorded, however the names of dozens of men and women from New Salem appear as purchasers of small quantities of consumable goods and the occasional luxury items like peppermint and candy. The last several pages of the ledger include accounts for particularly active customers, including several who supplied the store with large numbers of palm-leaf hats, which the store’s owner may have exported, and records of receipt for various kinds of paper, almanacs, toy books, and textbooks in mathematics and spelling.

The New Salem Academy was founded February 25, 1795, “for the purposes of promoting piety, religion, and morality, and for instruction of youth in such languages and in such of the liberal arts and sciences as the trustees shall direct.”

The collection consists of the student exercise book of Ernest Howe Vaughan, later a teacher in Greenwich and an attorney in Worcester, along with an issue of the alumni magazine, The Reunion Banner.

New Song Library letterhead

Founded by Johanna Halbeisen in 1974, the New Song Library was a collaborative resource for sharing music with performers, teachers and community activists, who in turn shared with a wide variety of audiences. Based initially in Boston, the Library was devoted to the music of social change and particularly music that reflected the lives and aspirations of workers, women and men, elders and young people, gays and lesbians, other minorities, and Third World people.

This collection contains over forty years of organizational and operational records of the New Song Library along with hundreds of sound recordings, primarily audiocassettes made at concerts, music festivals, song swaps, and gatherings of the People’s Music Network. The Library also collected newsletters and magazines on folk music, and most importantly dozens of privately produced songbooks and song indexes.

Founded in 1975 in Lebanon, NH, by Beth Dingman, Claudia McKay (Lamperti), Katie Cahill, Nina Swaim, and Shelby Grantham, New Victoria Printers became one of two all-female print shops in New England at the time. Believing strongly that “the power of the press belongs to those who own it,” they began to solicit work from non-profit and politically-oriented groups. Like its namesake Victoria Press, an 1860s women run print shop in London owned by Emily Faithful, an early advocate of women’s rights, New Victoria was also committed to feminist principles. The shop offered work and training in printing, machine work, and other traditionally male dominated fields; initially focused on printing materials from the women’s movement; and was organized as a collectively owned and democratically run organization.
Additionally, the shop functioned as a de facto women’s center and lesbian hub for Lebanon and the surrounding area, often overlapping with the lesbian social club Amelia Earhart’s Underground Flying Society, (a.k.a. the Amelia’s). The print shop was a place of education, community, creativity, and activism, and soon publishing opportunities, as the group founded New Victoria Publishers in 1976 to publish works from their community. The print shop closed in 1985, with Dingman and McKay taking over the running of the non-profit publishing company out of their home in Norwich, VT, with an emphasis on lesbian fiction in addition to other women-focused works. An early bestseller, Stoner McTavish by Sarah Dreher, put them on the map, with the company publishing over a hundred books by and about lesbians, winning three Lambda Literary Awards and several other honors.
The New Victoria Publishers Records consist of photographs, newsletters, and cards put out by the collective, materials printed by the press, marketing and promotional materials, author correspondence, graphics and cover art, book reviews, financial and legal records, histories of the organization, news clippings, and an almost full run of the books published by the company. The collection is particularly rich in documenting the work and production of a women owned business within the feminist press movement as well as the lesbian publishing industry.

New WORLD Theater was founded at UMass Amherst in 1979 by Roberta Uno with the mission of presenting innovative works of theater by contemporary artists of color, with the goal of fostering creative communities, promoting cultural equity, and embracing diverse cultural backgrounds, social engagement, and a commitment to justice. For more than thirty years New WORLD Theater produced many dozens of plays and other dramatic works representing new voices in the theater, as well as plays from the traditional multicultural repertory, and they have supported the arts through performance residencies, conferences and colloquia, and a variety of initiatives aimed at the diverse communities they serve, youth, and theater professionals. New WORLD Theater has contributed significantly to national conversations on cultural equity. After more than three decades of acclaim and recognition, New WORLD Theater was closed by UMass Amherst in summer 2010.
The bulk of the New WORLD Theater collection consists of administrative records documenting the day-to-day activities of the theater, however, it also contains an extensive and exceptionally rich archive of taped interviews, conferences, and theatrical productions. Taken together, the audiovisual material traces the history of New WORLD through the words and performances of artists who both contributed to and benefited from the theater.

Sandy Smith, one of the Communist Workers' Party activists killed at the Death to the Klan March, Nov. 1979

The National Anti-Klan Network (NAKN) was founded in Atlanta, Georgia by Rev. C.T. Vivian and Anne Braden in 1979, following attacks by armed members of the Ku Klux Klan during a march organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Decatur, Alabama, and the murder of five demonstrators of the Communist Workers Party in Greensboro, North Carolina in November 1979. The organization grew throughout the 1980s, working with other anti-Klan organizations to spread awareness of the continued violence and growing influence of the Klu Klux Klan.

In 1984, NAKN leadership began examining and reconsidering what the organization stood for, trying to ensure it was focused on working to end white supremacy. In 1985, after this year-long reassessment, the National Anti-Klan Network changed their name to the Center for Democratic Renewal to articulate their broader goals towards fighting racism.

This small collection contains correspondence, contact lists, anti-Klan handouts, and sources of information used by the New York chapter of the Anti-Klan Network, some of which pertain to the NAKN. It also includes newspaper clippings documenting KKK activity and other examples of racism in the early 1980s, and numerous reports of KKK activity and newsletters from other anti-klan groups. There is also a series of color slides used as part of an organizing slide show entitled “Greensboro Massacre – Turn the Country Upside Down to Avenge the CWP5” that documents the Greensboro murders of the Communist Workers’ Party activists and anti-racist/labor organizing.