A long-time member of the English Department at Mount Holyoke College, Also a founding member of the Valley Light Opera, a light opera company in Northampton that specializes in staging the plays of Gilbert and Sullivan (and whose records reside in SCUA).

The Ellis Theatre collection includes nearly 8,000 volumes pertaining to the English and American stage, 1750-1915, with a particular emphasis upon Victorian theatre.

Pioneers in the gay rights movements, Barbara Gittings and her life partner Kay Tobin Lahusen were also avid book collectors. After coming out during her freshman year at Northwestern University, Gittings became keenly aware of the difficulty of finding material to help her understand her gay identity, and from then on, sought out works on .

Gittings dedicated herself to working for full civic equality for gay people. An inveterate organizer, she helped found the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), the first lesbian organization in the U.S., and from 1963 to 1966 she was co-editor of the DOB's pioneer national magazine, The Ladder, helping to bring it to a more professional appearance. She was later a charter member of the boards of directors of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (founded in 1973) and the Gay Rights National Lobby (founded in 1976), which was the forerunner of the Human Rights Campaign.

Gittings was an activist in every sense of the word, not merely an organizer. She is remembered particularly for taking part in the first gay rights picket lines in the mid-1960s at the White House and the Pentagon, and for several years she held a high-profile vigil for gay rights in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Working with Frank Kameny and others, she led the campaign that led the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to drop its categorization of homosexuality as a mental illness in 1973, and she worked with the American Library Association to promote gay reading materials in libraries and prevent censorship. As part of the Task Force on Gay Liberation (later the Gay Task Force and the GLBT Round Table) within the ALA, she produced a series of bibliographies of gay books that remain valuable. In 2003 she was awarded ALA’s highest honor, an honorary membership.

Kay Lahusen is considered by many to be the first photojournalist of the gay movement. She has documented lesbian and gay political and cultural events since the 1960s and took many of the photos in the collection of Barbara Gittings as an activist. Lahusen met Gittings at a DOB picnic in 1962, and the two became life partners. She was Gittings's co-editor on The Ladder, and was one of the twelve founding members of the Gay Activists Alliance in 1969. She was also the author of The Gay Crusaders (New York: Paperback Library, 1972).

Over the years, she and Lahusen assembled a collection of over 1,000 books that document the history and culture of homosexuality in America. The collection includes historically important materials ranging from a long run of The Ladder to works on the psychology of homosexuality, novels by gay authors, and examples of the pulp fiction of the 1950s and 1960s.

A pioneer in the study of African American history and an activist for social and racial justice, August "Augie" Meier (1923-2003) received his masters degree from Columbia University for a cogent study of Black nationalism, and a doctorate for his work on racial ideologies in the time of Booker T. Washington. Among the few white scholars of African America at the time, Meier held positions at a succession of historically black colleges, beginning with Tougaloo (1945-1949), Fisk (1952-1957), and Morgan State (1957-1963), and at the progressive Roosevelt University (1963-1966), before landing permanently at Kent State University in 1966.

A prolific author and editor, Meier's work on the intellectual world of African Americans in the post-Reconstruction years evolved as the civil rights and Black Power movements grew. In the 1950s and early 1960s, he joined his students, colleagues, and friends in confronting racism directly, taking part in a number of civil rights protests, serving as advisor to the Non-Violent Action Group at Morgan State, and working with activists such as Jim Peck and Bayard Rustin. In his scholarly life, Meier and his long-time co-worker Elliott Rudwick, and later John Bracey, wrote important works on the history of the Congress of Racial Equality, the NAACP, the Black protest movements, and African Americans in organized labor and academia. Meier died shortly before his 80th birthday in 2003.

Housed for many years in the Horace Mann Bond Center, Meier's extensive collection of books was transferred to the Library with the assistance of John Bracey of the Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at UMass Amherst. The collection is a remarkable reflection of Meier's academic career and his interest in social justice and racial equality. From among the many thousands of volumes in Meier's library, SCUA selected several hundred titles, many of which have important associational value. Among these are scarce works on African American life and culture in the early twentieth century, on the African American church in the nineteenth century, slavery and antislavery, Black radicalism, Black writers, editions of works by Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey, and presentation copies of books by Melville Herskovits, Sam Bass Warner, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Owen Dodson, Jim Peck, and many others.

The August Meier Collection is currently being cataloged into the Du Bois library's on-line catalog. The books can be located in the catalog by searching under the title "August Meier Collection.

As a university student in Warsaw, Poland, in January 1977, Barbara Jakubowska made the decision to join the democratic resistance to the Communist regime. For more than twelve years, she was an active member of the Solidarity movement, organizing opposition to the state, producing and distributing underground literature, and working with the pirate broadcasts of Solidarity radio. Arrested many times for her activity, Jakubowska was

From early on, Jakubowska recognized the importance of the Solidarity publications and she went to extraordinary lengths to collect publications and preserve them. At various times, the collection was kept in the basement of her mother's house, spread around among a series of safe locations, and sometimes even secreted in small caches in back lots. Not long after Jakubowska moved to the United States in 1989, she managed to bring her Solidarity library with her, keeping it in her apartment in New York City until the summer 2007, when she decided to donate it to UMass Amherst. The collection is an extraordinary record of the wracking

Although it is deepest for Solidarity publications from Warsaw, Jakubowska was able to preserve publications from Wroclaw, Gdansk, and other centers of the resistance elsewhere in the country.

A resident of Grantham, N.H., and a UMass alumnus, Marshall Winokur was a 1965 graduate of UMass with a major in Russian, Winokur completed his M.A. and Ph.D. in Slavic Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1966 and 1973 respectively. While working on his doctoral thesis, he began to teach Russian and German at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where he remained for the duration of his academic career. He has published widely on Russian culture and presents slide lectures throughout the country on the fate of Russian Orthodox churches, convents, and monasteries under the Soviet regime. He has been a frequent visitor to Western Europe and the Soviet Union/Russia as both a scholar on various government and private exchanges as well as a tour leader.

In 1994, Winokur moved to Deering, N.H., and settled on an old farm, consisting of an old colonial house built circa 1800, a three-story barn dating to 1850, and a carriage house. It was here that he became interested in New Hampshire history. Always fascinated with old buildings, secular or religious, Winokur and his wife undertook an extensive restoration of the three structures on his property, sparking a wider interest in local history. As luck would have it, the town of Hillsborough was the childhood home of Franklin Pierce, New Hampshire's only citizen to become President of the United States. The restoration and guided tours of this stunning, colonial home fell to the Hillsborough Historical Society. He became an officer of the Society soon after moving to Deering, and was instrumental in several fund raisers and bringing in a variety of lecturers for our summer programs at the Franklin Pierce Homestead. As my wife and I began to explore historic New Hampshire, I made a point of frequenting antiquarian book stores throughout the state and collecting New Hampshire books.

Winokur's collection of New Hampshire books addresses many aspects of the Granite State to varying degrees: agriculture, architecture, artisans, bridges, cemeteries, charitable organizations, churches, economy, farming and livestock, public and private education, forests, President Franklin Pierce, furniture, state government, public health, historical figures, general history, town histories, lakes, law, libraries, logging, monuments, poets, preservation, taxes, town reports, rivers, scenery, Shakers, transportation, the White Mountains, and wild life.

There are a number of valuable reference works in the collection: Hammond’s Check List of New Hampshire History (1971), cites the critical books, articles, and pamphlets necessary to conduct both genealogical and historical research in the state. New Hampshire As It Is (1855) chronicles the region’s settlement to 1788 and it provides a description of the towns, cities, villages, curiosities, statistical tables, boundaries and area of the state. New Hampshire Churches (1856) gives a county by county, parish by parish account of the founding and progress of the churches in New Hampshire. Four 19th century gazetteers of New Hampshire provide valuable economic, historical, and statistical data for every populated area in the state. Two early twentieth century guides to New Hampshire, Rollins’ Tourists’ Guide-Book to the State of New Hampshire (1902) contains numerous detailed maps along with extensive information on accommodations ranging from rooms to cottages to luxury hotels. Many, if not most, of the old lodgings have vanished. He includes an incredible variety and number of maps to New Hampshire. The second work, the WPA’s New Hampshire: A Guide to the Granite State (1938) provides a wealth of information for both the tourist and the interested reader. A number of 19th century Annual Reports of Superintendents provide interesting, informative, and sometimes amusing commentary on the various school districts in the state. Problems of discipline and funding appear to have changed little in over 100 years. A large number of New Hampshire registers and business directories from the 19th century well into the 20th, contain vital statistics for every town in the state illustrating how the populated areas have grown and flourished. All of these reference works have business ads, many illustrated, for all sorts of products and services. It is interesting to see what was popular and in use in the old days as compared to today. Rare late 19th century biographical sketches of the New Hampshire governor and legislature are included in the collection. Samuel Chamberlain’s exquisite photographic works on old New England are part of the New Hampshire book collection. No one better captured on film the historic houses and buildings than did Samuel Chamberlain in the mid-20th century. Town histories were collected with an emphasis on illustration. Old photographs reveal much about a town’s past that is often difficult to conjure up when there is only a written text. The turn-of-the-twentieth century issues of Granite Monthly were purchased solely for their well-illustrated town histories, although this publication has a rich biographical, historical, and literary tradition. New Hampshire town histories were published in limited quantities because of cost and the small populations they served. The collection of magazines and journals deals with the culture, history, literature, and scenery of the State of New Hampshire, such as Historical New Hampshire, New Hampshire Profiles, and New Hampshire Troubadour. In addition, certain editions of Yankee were collected for article(s) covering President Franklin Pierce, New Hampshire’s only President, world famous portrait photographer, Lotte Jacobi, Ray Gibson, pewterer, and other less well-known residents, the old houses, and the stone arch bridges of Hillsborough and Deering where I used to live.

In October 2007, SCUA received the transfer of several hundred volumes relating to the First World War. Among these are key works on war-time propaganda in the United States and Britain, war-time and immediate post-war histories of the conflict, and a large number of personal narratives of participation in the military, Red Cross, and others.