Obrebski in Macedonia, ca.1931

A student of Bronislaw Malinowski, the Polish ethnographer Jozef Obrebski was a keen observer of cultural change among eastern European peasantry in the years before the Second World War. After working with the resistance in Warsaw during the war, Obrebski went on to do additional ethnographic research in Jamaica (with his wife Tamara), taught at Brooklyn and Queens College and C.W. Post University, and from 1948-1959, he was senior social affairs officer with the United Nations. He died in 1967.

The Obrebski collection consists largely of ethnographic data collected by Obrebski in Macedonia (1931-1932), Polesia (1934-1936), and Jamaica (1947-1948), including field and interview notes, genealogies, government documents relating to research sites, and ca. 1000 photographs; together with correspondence (1946-1974), drafts of articles, analyses of collected data, and tapes and phonograph records, largely of folk music; and papers of Obrebski’s wife, Tamara Obrebski (1908-1974), also an ethnologist and sociologist.

Established in the early 1980s, the UMass Peacemakers brought together students on the Amherst campus who were advocates for peace, in particular nuclear disarmament. Through education combined with action, such as rallies and civil disobedience, the Peacemakers hoped to build a community of people aware if their own ability to reverse the arms race and to decrease militarism in society and education.

An ardent Socialist and pacifist, Norman Thomas ran six times as a democratic socialist candidate for president of the United States. Born in 1884 in Marion, Ohio, the son of a Presbyterian minister, Thomas became a leading voice of the non-Communist left, taking up the causes of civil rights, peace, and social justice.

Thomas’s memoir traces the major events of his life from his boyhood and education at Bucknell and Princeton, to his experiences during both world wars, and from his acceptance of Socialism to his reflections on religion.

Thresholds to Life is a training program for decision making, problem solving, and life planning taught by volunteers to prison inmates and offenders on probation in 30 locations in the United States. The records in this collection are those of the Thresholds program in Greenfield, Massachusetts, a United Way agency.

Founded in September 1989, the University Anti-Intervention, Disarmament & Conversion Project was developed by individuals in the UMass Amherst community who wanted to eliminate the university’s dependence on defense research. The purpose of the project was to serve as a resource center for students, faculty, and community activists working to break the link between the nation’s institutions of higher learning and the military industrial complex.

The collection consists of a resource guide created by the group.

A noted journalist, editor, and first ombudsman for the Boston Globe, Charles L. Whipple was born in Salem, Mass., on May 8, 1914. A descendant of both a Salem witch and of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Whipple was a political radical as a young man, joining the Young Communist League during his sophomore year at Harvard in 1933, and taking part in a small communist study group within the American Newspaper Guild after joining the staff of the Boston Globe in 1936. Unfit for military duty due to a bad eye, Whipple served with the Red Cross for 30 months in Europe during the Second World War, earning a purple heart. He severed ties with the Communist Party when he returned to the Globe and civilian life, becoming the paper’s first opinion page editor, garnering attention in the 1960s for writing the first major newspaper editorial opposing the war in Vietnam. His last positions were as the paper’s first ombudsman in 1975 and, following his retirement from the Globe, as editor of the Beijing Review and the China Daily, China’s first English-language daily. Whipple died in Northampton, Mass., in 1991 from complications following surgery.

Containing both personal and professional correspondence, the Charles L. Whipple Papers document a long and distinguished career in journalism. The collection includes important information on Whipple’s experiences during the Vietnam War, as an employee of the Boston Globe, and as an American living in China in the late 1970s. Many of the correspondents in the collection reflect upon Whipple’s feelings toward his profession and the people he encountered along the way. Of particular note is the extensive correspondence relating to the American Newspaper Guild, including meeting minutes, schedules, and correspondence. The Subject Files include groupings of articles, news clippings, and writings collected by Whipple over his lifetime. The balance of the collection consists of printed materials with a few photos.

The daybook of this trader and merchant in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, reveals the quickening pace of economic activity connected to the burgeoning Plymouth County iron industry. While many of the transactions at the store are small purchases of flour, fabric, sugar, tobacco, meats, molasses, etc., interspersed are substantial purchases of bar iron, nails, metal plates, and other manufactured metal items accounting for an increasingly large share of the business.

Co-owned by Dorothy Johnson and Doris Abramson, the Common Reader Bookshop in New Salem, Massachusetts specialized in women’s studies materials, or in their words, “books by, for, and about women.” A couple for almost 40 years and married in 2004, Johnson and Abramson, a professor in the theater department at UMass, opened the store in 1977. After nearly twenty-five years in operation, the book shop closed its doors for business in 2000. Comprised mostly of photographs, the collection highlights not only the shop as a place, but also the the community it fostered.

The collection consists of photographs of the town of Enfield and its inhabitants from ca. 1916 until the late 1930s, just before the town was flooded in the making of the Quabbin Reservoir.

Fire Department of Enfield, Massachusetts. Includes a minutebook (1911-1938) that discusses the purchase and use of rubber clothing, the care and refurbishing of the engine house, fires put out, preparation of warrant articles for Town Meetings, submission of names for membership and the vote taken on them, and the annual Firemen’s Ball. Also contains 1902 booklet of Rules and Regulations, some financial records, and correspondence.