Collections: P

A Polish immigrant who arrived in the United States in 1912, Jacob Plata worked in factories in Chicago until the mid-1920s when he relocated to Massachusetts. Plata and his wife Mary operated a dry goods store on Main Street in Indian Orchard until his death in 1947, after which Mary continued in business until her death in 1963.

Jakob Plata’s autobiographical account, Pamietnik emigranta w Stanach Zjednoczonych (Memoirs of an emigrant to the United States), includes a literate and interesting account his emigration from Poland and transition into American life. This photocopy (114p.) was retained by the Plata family from a manuscript originally written for the Institute for Social Management in Warsaw in 1936.

Born in Brooklyn in 1933, Gerald Platt worked his way through Brooklyn College as a stevedore at the Navy Yard and went on to earn a PhD in Sociology under Ralph Turner at UCLA in 1963. Interdisciplinary in approach from the outset of his career, Platt became known for linking psychoanalytic theory and sociology in analyzing large-scale events, such as revolutions and mass social movements. After beginning his academic career at Harvard, he joined the Sociology Department at UMass Amherst in1970. He was the author of two noted works in psychoanalytic sociology, The Wish to Be Free: Society, Psyche and Value Change, with Fred Weinstein (1969) and Advances in Psychoanalytic Sociology, with Jerome Rabow and Marion Goldman (1987), and was co-author with Talcott Parsons of The American University (1973). Platt died of complications of Alzheimers disease on May 7, 2015.

Active in his academic field and in departmental and university administration, Platt left a substantial record of his years on faculty at UMass Amherst. His collection includes substantial professional correspondence, research materials on his study of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, and other topics, grant applications, and annual reports. As chair of the Department, Platt also left a body of materials relating to his administrative duties, including work on university committees.

Founded by Heneage Mandell in 1884, the London Playgoers Club met regularly “to afford members facilities for Critical Theatrical Discussions… in the form of… debate[s].” Playgoers in Victorian England did not generally enjoy a favorable reputation, stereotyped as abrasive at best and dangerous at worst. Mandell and his colleagues sought to promote a more genteel image of playgoers while nurturing a relationship between the players and audience.

The core of the Playgoers Club collection consists of a series of meeting minutes from 1884 to 1892, a list of all members who ran in club elections, and a brief, handwritten history of the club.

Pleasant Street Monthly Meeting was formed in 1952 when a group from the programmed Worcester Monthly Meeting sought unprogrammed worship. After more than a decade as an independent meeting, Pleasant Street came under the care of Connecticut Valley Quarterly Meeting in 1963, and a decade later, they began to hold joint meetings with Worcester, formally merging in 1979 to form the Worcester-Pleasant Street Monthly Meeting (later Uxbridge Monthly).

This small collection consists of photocopies of the two original minutebooks compiled by Pleasant Street Monthly Meeting prior to its merger with Worcester to form the Worcester-Pleasant Street Monthly Meeting (now Uxbridge Monthly Meeting).

Lynne Pledger became active in waste management issues when Casella Waste Systems, a New England-based landfill company, applied to expand operations in Hardwick, Mass., potentially threatening the public water supply. Organizing a grassroots campaign, Pledger succeeded in getting Casella to drop plans to rezone the landfill in 2007, after the company failed to garner the necessary support in town meeting. Pledger has remained active in zero waste and waste reduction efforts, serving on the Zero Waste Committee for the Sierra Club, on the Clean Water Action Campaign, on the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection Solid Waste Advisory Committee, and co-founding Don’t Waste Massachusetts, an alliance of 25 environmental organizations supporting waste reduction measures.

This small collection contains documentation of grassroots opposition to the expansion of the landfill at Hardwick, Mass. Collected by Pledger, the material includes environmental and site reports, some filings, background information on the site and landfills, and some correspondence relating to the controversy.

An East German screenwriter and playwright, Ulrich Plenzdorf was born into a Communist family in the working-class Kreuzberg district of Berlin in 1934, settling in East Germany after the war. Abandoning his undergraduate studies in philosophy at the University of Leipzig, Plenzdorf worked as a stagehand at the DEFA film studio while studying at the film academy in Babelsberg. His breakthrough as a writer came with the play Die neuen Leiden des jungen W (1972), which enjoyed enormous success internationally, selling more than four million copies in 30 languages. A year later, he followed up with the popular film, Die Legende von Paul und Paula (1973), and his popularity as a writer continued through unification. Plenzdorf died in Berlin on Aug. 9, 2007, at the age of 72.

This small collection includes research files on the screenwriter Ulrich Plenzdorf assembled by Albert R. Schmitt, a professor of German at Brown University. In addition to an early edition of Die neuen Leiden and a mimeograph copy of an English translation by Herbert Lederer, the collection includes a handful of letters and a few pieces of ephemera from early productions of Die neuen Leiden, along with reviews and scholarly articles of Plenzdorf’s work.

Collection documenting Polish American culture, language, and history consisting of newspapers and news clippings, programs for Polish religious and cultural events, newsletters of Polish American organizations, and Polish publications including religious works and language textbooks.

234 photographs taken by Marian Pokropek and others of a variety of subjects in Poland, including homes, farms, buildings, churches, businesses, wood carvings, ceramics, corn dollies, friezes, metalwork, sculptors, paintings, textiles, ceremonies, and a Jewish graveyard. Many of these images were published in Pokropek’s books.

Founded in 1989, the Polish Genealogical Society of Massachusetts is a not-for-profit organization devoted to encouraging and supporting research into Polish family history and more generally into Polish culture and history. The Society sponsors educational programs and publications and operates a research library at the Polish Center of Discovery in Chicopee, Mass.
The collection consists of a nearly complete run of the semiannual newsletter of the Polish Genealogical Society of Massachusetts, Biuletyn Korzenie (Roots Bulletin).

Includes booklets containing parish and community histories, photographs, and local advertisements celebrating Jubilee, other anniversaries, and events in over twenty Massachusetts Polish American parishes; booklets furnishing histories and names associated with Polish American groups (such as the Brotherly Aid Society and Polish American Veterans); an historical paper on the Chicopee Polish Community; a pamphlet including songs and recipes; photographs; a booklet; and two books.