Collections: W

A philosopher, writer, activist, and artist, Douglas Wilson founded the Rowe Conference Center affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist camp in Rowe, Mass. Born in Vancouver, B.C., in 1946, but raised primarily in California, Wilson earned degrees at UC Santa Barbara (1967) and the Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley (1970), before being ordained at the First Uniarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn. He first came to Rowe in 1971 to work as assistant director of the Junior High summer camp, but soon proposed building a center at Rowe modeled on the Esalen Institute which would offer year-round retreats and workshops founded in Unitarian Universalist principles of equality, justice, freedom, peace, and the respect for the interdependent web of all existence. Serving as Executive Director (and after 1985, as co-Executive Director with his partner Prue Berry), Wilson brought together people who were “politically aware, psychologically sophisticated, and religiously based,” ranging from the Berrigans and Nearings to Jean Houston and Abbie Hoffman. The Wilsons retired from Rowe in December 2012.

The Wilson collection contains nearly forty years of files accumulated during Douglas Wilson’s time as Director of the Rowe Conference Center. In addition to a nearly complete run of the Center newsletter, Wilson retained materials on dozens of the thinkers, writers, and activists who came to Rowe, with each file containing correspondence (usually both directions), background notes and clippings.

As an undergraduate at UMass Amherst, John S. Wilson undertook of study of gravestones in New Salem, Mass. Working under George Armelagos, he receiving a BA in Anthropology with honors (1971) for his work on the “social dimension of New England mortuary art,” and returned for an MA in (1976). Wilson later worked as Regional Historic Preservation Officer and Archaeologist for the Northeast Region of the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Part of the collections of the Association for Gravestone Studies, the collection includes two copies of John Wilson’s senior honors thesis, a card file associated with the thesis, and several dozen slides (both color and black and white) of New Salem headstones. Some images appear to be later prints of images taken in 1970-1971.

A union organizer and labor communicator, Rand Wilson became a rank and file organizer for the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union and helped win the first-ever contract for workers at Clinical Assays in Cambridge, Mass., in 1982. He has since taken part in dozens of successful organizing and contract campaigns, both regionally and nationally, for the Communications Workers of America, the Paperworkers, Carpenters, Teamsters and Service Employees International Union, and other unions. Wilson’s notable achievements include coordinating solidarity efforts with the CWA and IBEW during the massive NYNEX telephone workers’ strike in 1989; founding the Massachusetts branch of the community-labor coalition, Jobs with Justice; coordinating communications for the Teamsters in 1997 during the lengthy contract campaign and historic 15-day strike by the 185,000 workers at UPS; and organizing an AFL-CIO-led effort focused on financial institutions’ conflicts of interest that helped to thwart the Bush administration’s efforts to privatize social security. He served as national coordinator for “Labor for Bernie” during Sen. Sanders’ presidential campaigns and currently works as an organizer for the CHIPS Communities United coalition.

Documenting forty years of labor activism, the Wilson papers include important material from most of his major initiatives, including organizing campaigns with the CWA, files relating to the Justice at Work/Just Cause for All initiatives, organizing high tech, health care and telephone workers, and Jobs with Justice. Nearly half of the collection is comprised of a comprehensive collection of source materials and documents from the Teamsters’ UPS contract campaign and strike.

Seaman from Rochester, Massachusetts. Accounts provide information on work done, cargo and passengers carried, wages, ship expenses, and port charges. Also includes accounts of Philip Wing, Paul’s older brother, for agricultural, butchering, and ship carpentry work, as well as a loose sheet concerning probate court proceedings probably relating to the settling of Paul Wing’s estate after his death.

A long time professor of the Russian language, Marshall Winokur received his B.A. in Russian from the University of Massachusetts (1965) and his masters (1966) and doctorate (1973) in Slavic Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. While working on his doctoral thesis in 1969, he began teaching Russian and German at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa where he remained for the duration of his academic career. His research on Russian culture and the fate of Russian Orthodox churches, convents, and monasteries under the Soviet regime resulted in numerous publications and talks. After retiring from the University in 1994, Winokur and his wife Janice settled on an old farm in Deering, New Hampshire, consisting of an old house built circa 1800, a three-story barn dating back to 1850, and a carriage house, and has since been involved in the local community and exploring New Hampshire history.
The Winokur collection consists of hundreds of printed works pertaining to the history and culture of New Hampshire, about a quarter of which were published prior to 1900. Wide ranging in content, the collection includes state registers, directories, gazetteers, popular magazines, and a number of biographical works and local histories.

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Stored offsite; contact SCUA to request materials from this collection.

Activist and educator only begin to describe the accomplishments of social justice champion Robert M. (Bob) Winston. From a childhood attending politically progressive summer camps to his stand for justice in the early years of his ninth decade, Bob has always been guided by the Jewish value of, “Justice, justice, thou shalt pursue.” Whether as a member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a community organizer in the south, a civil rights and anti-war activist, or university professor, advocating and agitating for fairness, equality—justice—has always been Bob’s north star. That vision guided his work in human services as well, from standing up for the movement to deinstitutionalize incarcerated youth, to founding an agency offering comprehensive services to court-involved or severely emotional disturbed adolescents to teaching in adult correctional institutions. Born in New York City in 1942, Winston became active in the civil rights and antiwar movements, while building his academic career as a graduate student at Indiana.  As a professor at the University of New Hampshire, he was a campus leader in the antiwar movement. It cost him his job but cemented his commitment to doing what was right rather than what was expedient: compromising his values.  Moving to Amherst, Mass., he earned a doctorate in education at the University of Massachusetts while simultaneously directing the Valley Peace Center. His social justice activism continued, balancing engaging in sweeping movements with support for youth in need. He and his wife were foster parents to more than a dozen adolescents in need of emotional and social support. Over his decades of involvement in key movements of the 20th and 21st centuries, Bob was active in an array of causes from environmental justice on the micro and macro levels ( including protecting salamanders and protesting climate emergency indifference) to international peace building, on two missions with Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace; championing the intersection of art and cultural change, supporting veterans against war and Native Americans, among a host of vital human rights campaigns. Community building and fostering connections among people from disparate backgrounds was also central to Bob’s activism. His and wife Janet’s annual Left-Wing Chicken barbecues were legendary.

The Winston Papers are a mix of personal correspondence, subject files, posters, and audiovisual and printed materials documenting a career in social justice movements. The earliest materials in the collection stem from Winston’s involvement in the civil rights movement in Indiana and his opposition to the war in Vietnam, including a surprisingly wide array of materials from left-oriented periodicals to antiwar newspapers printed for servicemen and women, and the collection documents the ups and downs of his academic career. Later materials touch on his interests in U.S. intervention in Central America during the 1980s, the prison-industrial complex, civil liberties, and environmental issues.

With a complex history of names changes and switches in quarterly affiliation, Winthrop Monthly Meeting was founded in the Kennebec Valley, Maine, in 1813 as Leeds Monthly Meeting. It is currently a semi-programmed meeting under the care of Vassalboro Quarter.

SCUA’s holdings for Winthrop Monthly Meeting are limited to a single volume of meeting minutes (1944-1969); a volume recording births, death, and marriages; and two volumes of membership records. The bulk of the records for Winthrop are held in the collections of the Maine Historical Society.

Unidentified DJ in the WMUA master control room, ca. 1985

WMUA is UMass’ student/community run non-commercial FM radio station. In continuous operation since 1948, initially as an AM station, it serves the campus and surrounding communities in the Pioneer Valley and can be heard from the Connecticut to the Vermont border. Beginning in 1948, as students were first establishing the station, WMUA has been a constant presence on campus, weathering budget cuts, leadership upheavals and the rise and fall of radio as a dominant medium.

The records of WMUA document the history of a particularly long-lived organization at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst and reflect the changing culture of the campus. In addition to some administrative and financial records, the collection includes a number of promotional materials, newsclippings, photographs and recordings that reflect the history of the organization. Also noteworthy is a history of WMUA written in 1963 to commemorate its 15th anniversary as well as several oral histories with station alum from different eras. There are also press clippings, ephemera, press releases and recordings from the acclaimed Magic Triangle Jazz Series.

Additionally, there are hundreds of analog and digital recordings of shows that span three decades of the station’s history, with the bulk from 1987-2012. A separate, growing, inventory of the recordings is also available which includes descriptions, dates, and formats of the recordings.

A documentary about WMUA in the 1960s was produced by Stuart Goldman, an alumnus of the station, in 2021.

A photographer from Washington, D.C., Lloyd Wolf is a well known photojournalist and documentarian who often works on topics in social change. During the course of a career that began in the late 1970s, Wolf has worked on projects ranging from documenting the impact of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., to Jewish mothers and fathers, Moroccan Jewry, drug rehabilitation in prison, and Black-Jewish dialog.

The 13 images in the collection are part of Wolf’s series, “Acid Reign,” a project conducted in 1989 with a sociologist from UNC-Greensboro, Rebecca Adams, exploring the lives of dedicated Deadheads. The prints were made for exhibition at the symposium, Unbroken Chain: the Grateful Dead in Music, Culture, and Memory, held at UMass Amherst in November 2007. All rights remain with Lloyd Wolf.

Richard Wolff delivering a lecture at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, 2011. Photo by Joel Simpson

Hired to the UMass Amherst Economics Department as part of the “radical package” in 1973, Richard D. Wolff is an influential Marxian economist and professor emeritus of economics. Wolff was born in 1942 to Max and Lieselotte Wolff, who emigrated to the United States during World War II. He earned a BA in History from Harvard, MA in Economics from Stanford, and MA and PhD in Economics from Yale University, during which time he was an instructor at Yale. Before coming to UMass, Wolff also taught at the City College of the City University of New York. Wolff and his colleague and frequent collaborator, Stephen Resnick, wrote prolifically during their career at UMass, developing a new framework for considering political economy. While teaching at UMass, Wolff and his colleagues established the Association for Economic and Social Analysis (AESA), which sponsors publication of the journal Rethinking Marxism. In 2012, Wolff co-founded Democracy at Work, a non-profit producing media that provides education and analysis of capitalism, Marxism, and democratic workplaces.

The Richard Wolff Papers document the professorial and professional career of Wolff through course material, writings and publications, book contracts, floppy disks, and a plethora of correspondence in the form of handwritten letters and printed out emails. There is also a small but significant amount of personal material, including family scrapbooks from Germany and his mother’s manuscript on surviving the Holocaust.