Lewis Hanke

Lewis Hanke, the Clarence and Helen Haring Professor of History from 1969 to 1975, was a scholar of Latin American history, served as the president of the American Historical Association, worked extensively as an editor, and was best known for his research on Bartolome de Las Casas. Hanke was born in 1905 in Oregon City, Oregon, and received his B.S. and M.A. in history from Northwestern University. After earning his Ph.D from Harvard in 1936, the great depression barred his way to professorial appointment, allowing Hanke to work outside of academia as the director of the Hispanic Foundation until 1951. After teaching at the University of Texas and Columbia University, Hanke eventually became a professor at the University of Massachusetts in 1969 until his retirement in 1975. During his tenure at the University, Hanke edited the Guide to the Study of US History Outside the US, 1945-1980, and the year before his retirement, he served as the president of the American Historical Association, where he oversaw the re-writing of the AHA’s charter. Hanke died in March, 1993.

Lewis Hanke’s papers document his historical research and his prolific scholarly output. The largest portion of the collection are notes, correspondence and administrative records relating to his editorship of the Guide to the Study of US History Outside the US, 1945-1980, as well as a collection of his published and unpublished papers from 1939. The collection also includes notes, correspondence, and image reproductions for Hanke’s book Spanish Viceroys. The remainder of the collection is professional correspondence, documents from Hanke’s tenure as AHA president, and materials from his many research projects.

William E. Heronemus underwent a radical transformation during his tenure as Professor of Civil Engineering at the University. After serving in the U.S. Navy, engineering the construction of submarines from 1941 until his retirement in 1965, Heronemus disavowed his work with nuclear energy and joining the University faculty in 1967, dedicated his life to the study of alternative energy. Born in Madison, Wisconsin, Heronemus earned his B.S. from then United States Naval Academy and two M.S.s (Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering), from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Heronemus was invited to the University to help develop a research program in Ocean Engineering and focused his work on alternative energy to sources that could make use of oceanic power. William Heronemus retired from the University in 1978 and died of cancer on November 2, 2002.

The William E. Heronemus Papers document his research in alternative energy and his quest for harnessing wind and thermal power from the ocean through technical reports on alternative energy systems written from 1972 to 1974.

A particle physicist educated at Johns Hopkins (PhD, 1965), Stanley S. Hertzbach joined the Physics faculty at UMass Amherst in 1965. Over the course of his career, he took part in high-energy experimental work at Brookhaven National Laboratory, the CERN hadron collider, the Cornell electron synchrotron, and beginning in 1979, at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center). With his colleague Richard Koffler, Hertzbach joined the SLD collaboration at SLAC in 1986 studying Z particles, and the BaBar (B Meson) group in 1994. A major contributor to the SLD “beamline group,” Hertzbach took part in the BaBar calorimeter beam test and in testing of its calorimeter modules. He was an active member of the SLD advisory group and chaired the SLAC Users Organization (SLUO) in the 1990s. Hertzbach’s contributions to UMass included service on several committees relating to student achievement, including a stint as Undergraduate Advising Dean of the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. Hertzbach retired from UMass in 2009.

The Hertzbach collection consists of two distinct parts: six laboratory notebooks kept while conducting research at SLAC (1987-2002), and approximately 0.5 linear feet of records from university committees on which Hertzbach sat (e.g. the Space and Calendar, 1977-1983).

Professor of Physical Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst when it was known as Massachusetts Agricultural College who established the physical education program for women and helped to create the women’s gymnasium and athletic field. In her retirement she composed music that was performed by the University of Arizona orchestra.

Includes musical scores, lesson-plan photographs illustrating instruction in modern dance, correspondence, printed programs for performance of the musical compositions, text of an address, a history of physical education for women at Massachusetts State College by Mrs. Hicks, personnel records, and brief biographical items.

Curry S. Hicks

Curry S. Hicks pioneered the University’s athletics program as it transitioned from the Massachusetts Agricultural College to the University of Massachusetts. Hicks led the charge to build modern athletic fields and gymnasia and during his tenure, many of the University’s teams climbed to new heights of excellence. Born in 1885 in Enfield, New York, Hicks began undergraduate studies at Michigan State University but was forced to drop out because he was unable to pay tuition, beginning a teaching career that brought him from math teacher to high school principal. Returning to Michigan Normal School, Hicks earned his B.A. in physical education in 1909, followed by the Hitchcock Fellowship at Amherst College and eventually his assistant professorship in Physical Education and Hygiene at the University in 1911. On his retirement in 1949, Hicks left behind a thoroughly modernized athletics program and moved to Tucson, Arizona, where he passed away in 1963.

The Curry S. Hicks Papers consist of a bound volume of letters, sent to Hicks as a commemoration of his retirement in 1949 and a folder of correspondence related to his organization and fundraising efforts for a new physical education building at the University.

Shortly after earning his doctorate in plant pathology from Cornell in 1954, the internationally known phytopathologist, Francis W. Holmes began his career at UMass Amherst. Working in the Department of Plant Pathology (1954-1991) and later as Director of the Shade Tree Laboratories, Holmes became a leader in the study of Dutch elm disease, and he conducted important research on injury to trees from road salt and the relationship between salt injury and Verticillium wilt disease. During Holmes’s tenure, the Shade Tree Labs tested nearly 250,000 elm samples for Dutch elm disease and diagnosed a great variety of other diseases on more than 150 other types of trees. While on a Fulbright fellowship in the Netherlands, he devoted his free time to preparing a monograph on six Dutch women scientists who discovered the source of Dutch elm disease in the 1920s and 1930s. Holmes retired from the University in 1991 and remained in Amherst until his death in 2007.

The papers document Holmes’s research on shade trees and his tenure as a professor of microbiology. The collection includes some professional correspondence (1954-1977), awards, research notes and publications, and memorabilia. Holmes’s translations of phytopathological works from Dutch to English may be of interest to scholars of Dutch elm disease.

Bronislaw Honigberg was a parasitologist who, though studying the intestinal parasites of amphibians, provided research for the U.S. Department of Public Health’s infections diseases lab. Born in Warsaw, Poland in 1920, Honigberg fled to the United States at the beginning of World War II, cutting short his Polish medical education to become an undergraduate at the University of California Berkeley, where he earned his B.A. (1943), M.A (1946) and Ph.D. (1960). Honigberg joined the University faculty in 1961 and taught in the zoology department until his death in 1992.

The collection is comprised of Honigberg’s lecture notes, including exams, lab exercises, and illustrative material. There is also five folder of reprints spanning the years 1949 to 1991 and thus representing Honigberg’s research throughout his career.

A member of the Massachusetts State College Class of 1936, Leonta Gertrude Horrigan was affiliated with UMass Amherst throughout her long career in academia. After receiving he MA from Smith College in 1942 for a thesis on DeQuincy and Milton, Horrigan taught creative writing, composition, among writing classes, to UMass undergraduates, and was frequently singled out as a favorite instructor on campus. In 1964, she was appointed Assistant Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, and retired to emeritus status in 1986.

The Horrigan Papers contain nearly a half century record of instruction in writing education at UMass, with a wide array of other materials relating to Horrigan’s varied interest, events on campus, and to the evolution of the university in the post-war years.

David R. Inglis at Argonne N.L., ca.1953

David R. Inglis enjoyed a distinguished career in nuclear physics that ranged from theoretical work on the structure of the nucleus in the 1930s to the development of the atomic bomb in the 1940s and work on renewable energy in the 1960s and 1970s. A Professor of Physics at UMass from 1969-1975, Inglis was a founding member of the Federation of American Scientists and from the mid-1940s on, he dedicated himself to informing public policy on the dangers of nuclear technologies.

The Inglis Papers offer a perspective on the life and career of a theoretical physicist who grew from an early involvement in the Manhattan Project to becoming a committed critic of nuclear weaponry and nuclear power. Although the collection is relatively sparse in unpublished scientific work, it includes valuable correspondence relating to Inglis’s efforts with the Federation of American Scientists and other organizations to influence public policy on issues relating to disarmament and nuclear power.

Beginning with his dissertation in theoretical astrophysics “Local irregularities in a universe satisfying the cosmological principle” (Harvard, 1961), William M. Irvine enjoyed a distinguished career as an astronomer and a role as one of the primary figures in developing astronomy at the Five Colleges. Arriving at UMass in 1966, Irvine helped build the graduate program in astronomy and beginning in 1969, he was a motive force in establishing the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory. Focussed largely on the chemistry of dense interstellar clouds and the physics and chemistry of comets, and with a broad interest in bioastronomy, Irvine has been a prolific contributor to his field, and has served as Vice President of the Commission on Bio-astronomy at the International Astronomical Union, a member of Federal Union, Chair of the Division for Planetary Sciences at the American Astronomical Society, and he has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The Irvine Papers offer a thorough record of the establishment of the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory from 1969 through its dedication in Oct. 1976, along with insights into the growth of astronomy at UMass. Correspondence, memoranda, grant applications, and many dozens of photographs offer insight into the financial and political challenges of building the Observatory in the Quabbin watershed. The collection also includes notes for teaching Astronomy 101 and 223 (planetary science).