Collections: S

Born in Montefegatesi, Italy, in April 1937, Roland Sarti began his academic career as a teaching assistant and instructor at Rutgers University from 1960-1964. In the fall of 1967, he was appointed Assistant Professor of Italian History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, becoming chair of the University Seminar on Studies in Modern Italy five years later. A scholar of the fascist movement in Italy, Sarti also wrote on topics ranging from rural life in the Apennines to the life of the revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini. During his tenure at UMass, he served on the Personnel, Curriculum, and Graduate Studies Committees, and played a prominent role in the Faculty Senate and the International Programs Office, particularly with respect to the summer programs in Italy. A past president of the New England Historical Society and the Society for Italian Historical Studies, he was a board member for the European History Quarterly and the H-Italy Network. He retired from active teaching in 2002.

The Sarti Papers document Sarti’s distinguished career as professor, author, and chair of the History Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. They consist of professional correspondence, history department records, records of major crises at the University, Italian studies newsletters, student publications, and historical society records. A significant amount of the materials, particularly among the correspondence and periodicals, are in Italian.

Access restrictions: Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA in advance to request materials from this collection.

Distinguished researchers in the Department of Anatomy and Structural Biology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Birgit and Peter Satir have made fundamental contributions to the study of exocytosis and the ultrastructure of cellular motility. While working on his doctorate at the Rockefeller Institute, Peter spent 1958 studying at the Carlsberg Biological Institute in Copenhagen, where he met Birgit. After completing their degrees in 1961 and marrying the next year, the couple went on to academic appointments at the University of Chicago and Berkeley. Although they are considered the first couple to be allowed to work in the same department at Berkeley, Birgit was never fully salaried, prompting the Satirs to move to more favorable circumstances at Einstein in 1977. Birgit’s research has centered on the nature of microdomains in cell membranes and how cells secrete chemical products, while Peter has studied the role of the structure and function of cilia and flagellae in cell motility.

The Satir collection contains professional correspondence, journals, and several thousand electron micrographs and motion picture films of ciliates and flagellates taken in the course of their research.

A lifelong resident of Springfield, Mass., Athena Savas was a passionate collector who assembled a massive trove of cookbooks over the course of almost forty years.

The Savas Cookbook Collection contains many hundreds of commercially-produced and community cookbooks, primarily from New England. As a collector, Savas was particularly interested in ethnic and regional cookery, but she ranged widely to include corporate cookbooks and works relating to subjects such as waiting tables, home entertainment, and restaurants.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Albert Sawin and his wife Elizabeth (nee Young) lived on Taylor Street in Holyoke, Massachusetts, with their three children, Allan, Ralph, and Alice. Elizabeth’s brother, also named Allan, traveled in the west during the 1880s, looking for work in Arizona, Utah, and Montana.

The bulk of the Sawin-Young Family Papers consists of letters exchanged between Elizabeth “Lizzie” Sawin, her sisters, and Jennie Young of nearby Easthampton. Later letters were addressed to Beatrice Sawin at Wheaton College from her father Walter E. Sawin, who contributed to the design for the Holyoke dam. The photograph album (1901) kept by Alice E. Sawin features images of the interior and exterior of the family’s home, as well as candid shots of family and friends and photographs of excursions to nearby Mt. Tom and the grounds of Northfield School.

One of the most frequently published photographers in Life magazine during the late 1960s, Rowland Scherman is noted for an iconic portfolio that documents the worlds of politics, culture, and the rock music scene. Born in New York in 1937, Scherman attended Oberlin College and began his career in the darkroom at Life before winning an assignment as the first official photographer for the Peace Corps in 1961. His work blossomed after becoming a free-lancer two years later, with assignments that included the civil rights March on Washington and the presidential campaign of Lyndon Baines Johnson. He covered the Newport Folk Festival when Bob Dylan broke on the national scene, the Beatles’ first concert in the U.S., Robert Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency, and Woodstock, and he went along on a memorable tour with Judy Collins. His work has appeared in dozens of magazines and books, including Life, Look, Time, National Geographic, Playboy, and Paris Match, earning wide acclaim, including a Grammy Award in 1968 for the portrait that appears on the cover of Dylan’s greatest hits album. Scherman relocated to London in 1970, then to Birmingham, Ala., in the 1980s, and finally to Cape Cod on 2000. He continues to shoot portraits, photo essays, and abstract work.

This rich collection consists of nearly the entire body of work from Rowland Scherman’s long career in photography, including negatives and transparencies with a small selection of prints. Negatives from the March on Washington and the Peace Corps are in the collections of the Library of Congress.

Jennifer P. Schneider, M.D., Ph.D., is a physician certified in Internal Medicine, Addiction Medicine and Pain Management. She is the author of 15 books and numerous articles in professional journals. She is a nationally recognized expert in two addiction-related fields: addictive sexual disorders and the management of chronic pain with opioids. She also has experience and interest in the area of osteoporosis and its drug treatment, and maintains an email support group for people who have experienced atypical femur fractures related to the use of bisphosphonate medications. Dr. Schneider has written several articles in medical journals about egg donation and its potential long-term risks. Now retired from direct patient care, her professional activities include writing, lecturing at conferences, serving as an expert witness in legal settings, and appearing as a media guest on television and radio. One of her main current activities is to teach a remedial 21-Continuing Medical Education course on appropriate prescribing of controlled substances for chronic pain, under the auspices of Professional Boundaries Education in multiple locations in the U.S. 

The collection contains Dr. Schneider’s published articles, books, and book reviews on sex addiction and its effects on the partner; use of opioids in the treatment of chronic pain; femur fractures caused by the usual osteoporosis treatment with bisphosphonates; and potential cancer risk from egg donor protocol. In addition to her professional work, the collection also documents the family history of Raphael Patai and Naomi Nir along with their children, Daphne Patai and Dr. Schneider, through extensive correspondence, original paintings by Naomi Nir, a journal kept by Nir and Raphael Patai from 1949-1951. SCUA holds the papers of Naomi Nir and Daphne Patai.

After retiring from a career as a nurse and a health coach, Jean Schnell immersed herself in the photography world. Her work has been featured in numerous exhibits and shows throughout the New England region including the Moakley Courthouse in Boston, the S&G Gallery in New Bedford, Mass., the Martha’s Vineyard Museum, and the Davis Orton Gallery in Hudson, N.Y. In 2017, Schnell was a Critical Mass finalist.  Her Quaker meetinghouse photographs have been featured in Lenswork and Yankee magazines. The Friends Journal published her article “Framing the Light: Quaker Meetinghouses as Space and Spirit” accompanied by her photographs. 

In 2014, Schnell embarked on a project to photograph the twenty-three Quaker meetinghouses in Massachusetts. As a lifelong Quaker, Schnell sought to document the significance of the meetinghouses both as historic buildings and as spiritual spaces. Her collection contains photographic prints of the scenes she captured along with her notes, research materials, and various publications that include images from the project.

Born in Richmond, Va., in 1946, Ronald Wayne Schrum served as a corporal in the 9th Engineer Battalion, US Marine Corps, during the Vietnam War. Based in Chu Lai, on the coast 56 miles southeast of Da Nang, the 9th Engineers were responsible for the maintenance of bridges and roads, and perhaps most importantly mine sweeping. Schrum was wounded in action in August 1967, returning to duty after a short recuperation. While on leave in May 1968, Schrum married his fiancee Carolyn Ann Garrett, and the two settled in Virginia after the end of his time in service. Schrum died in Glen Allen, Va., on June 20, 1995.

A compact record of one marine’s service in Vietnam, this collection contains letters written by Ronald Schrum to his fiancee describing his duties as a combat engineer near Chu Lai. Covering only the months from Jan. 1967 to Nov. 1968, they include accounts of mine sweeping, fire fights with the Viet Cong (including one in which he was wounded in action), the Tet Offensive, and life on base, and increasingly as the couple approach their marriage, the letters are marked by a longing for his wife and home and a literal counting down of days remaining in service.

Robert and Waldemar Schultze were brothers from Buffalo, New York, held in disciplinary army barracks because of their status as conscientious objectors during the Second World War. Both Robert and Waldemar wrote to their mother, Jennie Schultze, frequently, and she to them. The collection contains roughly 120 letters, almost all of them dated, spanning mainly from 1943 to 1944. Robert, the younger of the two Schultze boys, also wrote to his fiancee Helen Anne Rosen.

The letters concern everything from the family dog to the family business. Due to strictly enforced censorship, the brother’s were cautious in the official letters home to their mother. Waldemar and Robert were able to sneak a handful of letters out of prison to their mother, however, and in those letters they wrote honestly about the conditions they encountered. In one such letter, Waldemar wrote his mother and told her about the threat of postponing his good behavior release date if he should slip up and write something that had to be censored, or even if she wrote something to him that needed to be censored. A small amount of correspondence exists that is addressed to Jennie from Attorneys J. Barnsdall and J. Cornell, regarding Robert and Waldemar’s case.

Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA to request materials from this collection.

Founded in 1964, the Science Fiction Society at UMass Amherst is one of the oldest university based clubs of its kind in the United States. From the beginning, the members of the Society built a library to share books and periodicals, eventually amassing one of the largest circulating science fiction collections on the east coast, and they encouraged members to write their own fiction, at various points publishing their own magazine.

The Science Fiction Society Collection contains thousands of issues of science fiction periodicals from the golden age of the 1940s through the late 1990s. The collection includes essentially complete runs of major titles such as Galaxy and Analog, as well as minor and more ephemeral magazines.