With a population of nearly a million French Americans, Massachusetts bears witness to the largest continental migration experienced in the Northeast. Under a grant from the Massachusetts Foundation for Humanities and Public Policy, 44 interviews of Franco Americans in the region were conducted from August 8, 1982 to January 18, 1983.

These interviews document the lives of those individuals, covering a period beginning in the late nineteenth century through 1984.

A professor of English at UMass Amherst, James A. Freeman is a scholar of seventeenth century British literature who has compiled an impressively eclectic array of publications and research projects. Educated at Amherst College (AB 1956) and the University of Minnesota (PhD 1968), Freeman joined the faculty in the English Department at UMass shortly after completing his doctorate. He has published on topics ranging from Latin and Greek poets to Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Tennyson, James Agee, Donald Duck, 17th century regicides, and 1930s radio. He has also served as a regular contributor and editor for the Association for Gravestone Studies Quarterly.

The Freeman collection consists of many hundreds of cassette tapes of radio broadcasts from the 1930s through early 1950s, reflecting the culture of commercial radio during its golden age. The collection includes representatives of most of the major genres, including comedy, drama, suspense and mystery, soap operas, and westerns. There is some depth popular programs such as Amos and Andy, the Great Gildersleve, Philip Marlowe, and Nero Wolfe, but the collection also includes less common and short-lived shows.

U.S. Marshal of Massachusetts in charge of collecting the census for his judicial district in 1860. Includes petitions, letters of introduction and applications to him from prospective enumerators, list of assistants and their signed oaths, census returns, related correspondence, and certificates of receipt from the marshal’s office. Also contains letters from Joseph C.G. Kennedy to Freeman, an instruction book for assistants, the marshal’s oath, and a receipt for a set of returns from the Secretary of the Commonwealth.

A professor of design in the Department of Art, Architecture, and Art History, Arnold Friedmann worked throughout his career to professionalize interior design and enhance the quality of daily life through good design. Born into a “gut Buergerlich” Jewish family in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1925, and raised in comfortable circumstances, Friedmann’s life was deflected by the political turmoil of the twentieth century. After Kristallnacht drove home the political realities of the Nazi era, Friedmann’s father used connections to secure permission for the family to emigrate to Palestine, where, impoverished and with his education disrupted, Arnold apprenticed to a cabinetmaker. Following service in the British army and later the Israeli army, Friedmann resumed his education, entering the Pratt Institute to study interior design. Earning both his bachelors and masters degrees (his doctorate from the Union Institute followed in 1976), Friedmann freelanced in interior design and furniture design while teaching at Pratt, eventually becoming chair of his Department. From 1972 until his retirement in 1990, Friedmann served as Professor of Design at UMass Amherst. A founding member of the Interior Design Educators Council, Friedmann was recognized within the profession as an honorary fellow of the Design Institute of Australia (1985) and as a recipient of the IKEA Award (1989).

The Friedmann Papers contain a wealth of unpublished and published writings by Friedmann on design, stemming primarily from his years at UMass Amherst. A small sheaf of photographs depicting his design work, and a series of Department of Interior Design newsletters from Pratt, 1963-1967.

In 1841, George H. Gilbert and Charles A. Stevens formed a partnership to manufacture broadcloth and cloaking in Ware, Massachusetts. Ten years later, the partnership dissolved and each partner carried a part of the business into separate establishments. The newly formed George H. Gilbert Company continued making high-grade woolen flannels, for which it developed a national reputation, until 1930.

Records, consisting of correspondence, financial records and cash books, construction contracts, sales lists, production records, and sample books, document the operation of Gilbert and Stevens and later the Gilbert Company for almost a century. The labor accounts (1851-1930), document the phases of the varying ethnic composition of the workforce — Irish, French-Canadian, and eventually Polish — well as the family orientation of the mills.

Founded in 1895, the Girls Club of Greenfield provides high quality early care and educational services to the girls of Franklin County, Massachusetts, and advocates for the rights of children and their families. During the school year, the Club offers diverse programming, ranging from an infant room and preschool to after school activities that promote teamwork, community spirit, social skills, and confidence. Since 1958, they have also operated a summer camp, Lion Knoll, in Leyden.

The records of the Girls Club of Greenfield include by-laws, annual reports, reports and meeting minutes of the Board of Directors, correspondence, and ledgers and account books. Also contains program files for daycare, summer camp, education worker programs, and others, personnel records, membership and committee lists, newsletters, press releases, ledgers, account books, scrapbooks, news clippings, photographs, slides, and artifacts.

Charles A. Goessmann, ca.1890

German-born agricultural chemist, professor of Chemistry at the University of Massachusetts Amherst when it was known as Massachusetts Agricultural College, and President of the Association of Official Agricultural Chemists and the American Chemical Society who made several important contributions in nineteenth century chemistry and held at least four patents.

The Goessman collection includes correspondence (mostly professional), some with presidents of Massachusetts Agricultural College, William Smith Clark (1826-1886) and Henry Hill Goodell (1839-1905). Also contains handwritten drafts of addresses and articles, his dissertation, printed versions of published writings, handwritten lecture notes, class records, proposed college curricula, notes taken by students, handwritten research notes, newsclippings and offprints utilized in research, and biographical materials.

Felix Goldberg (1866-1948) was born in Zhuprahn, Lithuania in 1866, emigrating with his second wife, Janet Zelda, to the United States at the turn of the century. Although trained as an engraver, Goldberg was frequently unable to practice his trade due to ill health, and was supported by the boarding house for factory workers and itinerant ice harvesters run by his wife.

A loosely autobiographical manuscript written in Yiddish in the early 1930s by Felix Goldberg, an engraver who immigrated to the U.S. around 1900.

On April 7, 1655, after a conclave of 80 days, Fabio Chigi was elected to succeed Innocent X as Pope. Taking the name Alexander VII, Chigi was initially viewed as an opponent of papal nepotism, however little progress was made. He served as pope until his death on May 22, 1667.

Bound in 18th century leather with an prefatory letter by the Prieur Gourreau, this manuscript was apparently intended for publication and may be an 18th century transcription of a presumably earlier manuscript. Editions of the Le Conclave d’Alexandre VII, ou Relation véritable de tout ce qui s’est passé et négocié au Conclave tenu à Rome depuis le 17 janvier jusqu’au 7 avril 1655 au sujet de l’élection du cardinal Fabio Chigi appeared in 1666 and 1667.