Collections: UMass Archives

Center for International Education

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

The Center for International Education (CIE) was established in 1968 as a research and implementation organization within the Department of Educational Policy, Research, and Administration in the College of Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In partnership with the academic program in International Education, CIE helps to foster a community of learning and practice on campus and in international development settings, offering opportunities in the areas of International Development Education, Education Policy and Leadership, Nonformal/Popular Adult Education, Basic Education and Literacy, and Internationalizing U.S. Education. The Center has a long and successful history of grant and contract management for projects designing, implementing, and evaluating educational initiatives internationally, and does additional work locally, including Massachusetts Global Education for teachers, and educational and leadership trainings for transitioning students and for immigrant and refugee communities. Additional material from CIE is available through the university’s institutional repository, ScholarWorks.

The bulk of this record group consists of files associated with CIE projects, organized by country and topic, including projects in Central Asia, South Asia, Central and South America, the Middle East, North America, and numerous projects in Africa. The records of CIE faculty member David R. Evans are heavily documented, particularly his work in Uganda. This material also includes multiple examples of “games” used by the Center in various teaching and training sessions to stimulate discussion and creativity. Additional records cover the administrative history of CIE, including founding materials and early files, reports and committee records, newsletters, photographs, and information about Center activities, celebrations, and visitors. A number of CIE publications, including their series, Technical Notes, are also available.

Business courses were first offered at the Massachusetts Agricultural College in the early years of the twentieth century, expanding rapidly during the 1930s and 1940s in response to student demand. The Board of Trustees established the School of Business Administration in 1947, and within seven years, it was conferring graduate degrees, including doctorates after 1967. In 1998, the School was renamed the Eugene M. Isenberg School of Management.

The record group consists of annual reports, deans’ records, correspondence, committee reports, long-range planning, self-study reports, proposals, research reports, faculty reprint series, lists of faculty publications, general publications, brochures, seminar information, newsletters, newsclippings and other related materials.

The University’s first Dean of Students, William F. Field held the post from 1961 until his retirement in 1988. The 27 years Field was Dean of Students was a critical time of growth and unrest, as the University’s student population more than tripled in size and the nation-wide movements for civil rights and against the Vietnam War were reflected through student activism and protest on the University’s campus. Responsible for ending student curfews and overseeing all dorms becoming co-ed, Field also worked with minority students and faculty to support the Black Arts Movement on campus and the founding of the W.E.B Du Bois Afro-American Studies Department.

The William F. Field Papers document Field’s career as an administrator at the University of Massachusetts and specifically his role as Dean of Students from 1961-1988. The correspondence, memoranda, reports, notes, and other official printed and manuscript documents are a rich resource for one of the most important and volatile eras in the University’s history. Of particular interest are extensive files on student protests and activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the growing diversity of the campus student population, flourishing of the Black Arts Movement on campus and the founding of the W.E.B. Du Bois Afro-American Studies Department.

The Massachusetts State Employees’ Association (MSEA) was founded in 1943 to protest proposed changes in the state employees’ retirement system. By 1969, the group had become the exclusive bargaining agent for the University’s administrative, clerical, and technical employees.

This small collection includes the constitution and by-laws of the MSEA along with Executive Board and general body minutes, correspondence, contracts, legislative materials, grievance records, hearing transcripts and decisions pertaining to job reallocations, subject files, newsletters, and press releases that document the UMass chapter of the Massachusetts State Employees’ Association from 1955 to 1978.

One of the oldest programs of its kind in the country, the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at UMass Amherst was established by the poet Joseph Langland in 1963, offering students an opportunity for intensive focus on their creative work. Unlike the Iowa Writers Workshop, where Langland had studied, students in the UMass program were required to take coursework outside of writing workshops. Over its first fifty years, the program has grown into one of the top ten in the nation and its graduates and faculty have been recognized with awards from the Pulitzer to the National Book Award, Pushcart Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and US Poet Laureate.

The MFA collection contains a growing body of work from students, alumni, and faculty affiliated with the Program for Poets and Writers at UMass Amherst. Among the hundreds of volumes are novels, collections of short stories, plays, and poetry, including a large number of chapbooks and small press imprints.

A member of the UMass Amherst Department of Food Technology and Nutrition, Peter Pellett was educated at Borough Polytechnic in London (BS 1952) and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (PhD 1956). After several years in research in London, Beirut, and MIT, Pellett came to UMass as head of the Dept. of Nutrition in 1971, where he worked on problems in nutrition and international development. He consulted frequently with the World Health Organization, USAID, and UNICEF. Pellett was granted emeritus status after his retirement from UMass in 2000, but remained active into his early 80s.

While working on UN development missions to Iraq, Pellett witnessed the dire health consequences of the sanctions imposed on the country and became active in critiquing US policy. This small collection relates primarily to Pellett’s work on the Iraq sanctions.

Born in Sacramento, Calif., but raised in Colorado, the biological anthropologist Alan C. Swedlund received each of his degrees at the University of Colorado Boulder (PhD, 1970). After a brief stint at Prescott College, Swedlund joined the faculty at UMass Amherst in 1973, where he helped to develop the doctoral program in biological anthropology and chaired the department for five years in the early 1990s. A prolific scholar, he drew upon diverse methodologies drawn from demography, epidemiology, and physical anthropology to explore interactions between cultural processes and human biological conditions in populations ranging from the Ancient Pueblo of the southwestern United States, to contemporary Central America and Yucatan, and historical New England. Among dozens of publications, he was author or editor of seven books, including Shadows in the Valley: A Cultural History of Illness, Death, and Loss in New England, 1840-1916 (2010), Plagues and Epidemics: Infected Spaces Past and Present (2010), and Beyond Germs: Explorations of Indigenous Depopulation in North America (2015). He was granted emeritus status upon his retirement in 2008.

The Swedlund papers include extensive professional correspondence from his first professional appointment at Prescott College through the time of his retirement, along with numerous grant applications, unpublished papers and talks, and research data. Of particular note are extensive records and data files for his study of nineteenth century demography in the Connecticut River Valley and Franklin County, Mass.

Established in western Massachusetts in 1863 as the Massachusetts Agricultural College, the University of Massachusetts Amherst is a national research university and the flagship campus of the state’s five-campus University system. UMass, one of the founding members of the Five College Consortium established in 1965, offers reciprocal student access among the University and Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges. The University currently enrolls approximately 24,000 undergraduate and graduate students, and offers 87 bachelors degree programs, 6 associates, 73 masters, and 51 doctoral programs in 10 schools and colleges.

The Archives of the University of Massachusetts Amherst document the institutional memory of the campus and serve as the largest and most comprehensive source of information on the history and cultural heritage of the University. As the collective memory of the university, the repository contains official records and items having historical value such as records of governance, policy, operation of administrative offices, departments, research, programs, and publications. Unpublished materials in the Archives include photographs, films, memorabilia, administrative records of major university offices, and the papers of presidents, trustees, administrative officers, and members of the faculty.

Please note that collections for individual faculty members, administrators, and students, as well as selected groups and administrative units at the University are listed separately in UMarmot. The Concordance to the Archives is an alphabetical listing of University departments, centers, groups, and other units, providing call numbers, when appropriate. Researchers may also wish to consult the online guide to UMass Amherst collections. Digital UMass includes a growing number of oral histories and digitized collections of papers and organizational records. YouMass is a wiki devoted to the history of the University and its predecessors, the Massachusetts Agricultural College and Massachusetts State College.

View:

• Concordance to the archives
• YouMass wiki

Beginning in the 1970s, UMass Amherst began conducting oral histories to record the memories and experiences its community, and it has conducted several focused projects since, including projects tied to the 125th and 150th anniversaries of the university. The Department of Special Collections in the University Libraries regularly conducts audio and video interviews throughout the university and with members of the local community.

The interviews that comprise the this collection represent a lengthening history of oral historical work centered on the history of the UMass Amherst community. The topics of interviews range widely from administration, academic research teaching, state and local politics, student life, and activism

The new Massachusetts Agricultural College welcomed its first contingent of 34 students to campus on October 1, 1867, resulting in the first graduating class of 28 — the Pioneer Class of 1871. The student body waxed and waned in ensuing years as the college slowly began to diversify its curriculum and the students population itself, admitting international students as early as 1870, followed by graduate students (first degree awarded 1896), African Americans (class of 1901), and women (class of 1905). Enrollment at the university first topped 1,000 in 1945 rising to 6,000 by 1960. Following a tumultuous period of great expansion, UMass had over 23,000 students in 1970.

Organized by class year, this series includes a diverse body of material generated by undergraduate students at Massachusetts Agricultural College, Mass. State College, and UMass Amherst from its beginning to the present day. Although the content varies widely from class to class and by period of time, typical years includes basic data on the graduating class, publications by alums, reunion information, class notes, photographs, or small collections of letters written while in school. In a few cases, the quantity representing an individual almuna or alumnus has led SCUA to treat the materials as a separate collection with its own finding aid.