The Southeast Asia Collection highlights the regional wars from the 1970s to the 1980s, including a series on Southeast Asian refugees in America, along with materials on regional economic development, especially in the Mekong River Basin. The collection contains hundreds of reports on agricultural and industrial projects in the region, examining everything from the impact of electrification on village life in Thailand to a description of a Soviet-built hospital in Cambodia in 1961, to an assessment of herbicide in Vietnam in 1971.

Collected primarily by Joel Halpern and James Hafner, the collection includes background, field, and situation reports by U.S. Operations Missions and U.S. Agency for International Development; reports, publications, statistics, and background information from other U.S. government agencies, governments of Laos and Thailand, and the United Nations; correspondence, reports, and reference materials of nongovernmental organizations; reports and essays by individuals about Southeast Asia; news releases and newspapers; published and unpublished bibliographies; and interviews with U.S. military personnel. Most material comes from governmental and organizational sources, but there are papers by, and debriefs of, numerous individuals.

Photographs taken in the 1960s by the United States Information Service depicting Lao dignitaries, the funeral of King Sisavongvong, the cremation of Prince Ratsamphanthavong at Luong Prabong, a Pathet Lao soldier, a Yao woman, and a Lao woman.

The academic departments at UMass Amherst are organized within ten schools and colleges. Among the more than 88 degree programs in 2009, 74 confer masters degrees, and 53 confer doctorates.

Containing the records of individual academic departments, programs, institutes, and centers, Record Group 25 documents the shifting history of disciplinarity and departmental affairs at UMass Amherst. The papers of individual faculty members are contained within the Faculty and Staff (FS) collections and are indexed separately in UMarmot.

Goat cart at football game vs.
Amherst College, ca.1913

The University Archives contains the official and unofficial records of the University of Massachusetts Amherst throughout its evolution from a small agricultural college into a dynamic and complex university. Within the archives are letters and artifacts, records, photographs, and sound recordings documenting the lives of its founders, the pursuits of its faculty, and the changing attitudes of its students and alumni, revealing what high quality public education means to our Commonwealth and nation.

Among the hundreds of discrete collections and over 13,000 linear feet of records are the official papers of Chancellors, Presidents, Trustees, and other administrators; information about the University’s academic units and student organizations; and the founding documents of our sister campuses at Worcester, Boston, Lowell, and Dartmouth. The papers of faculty members add a wealth of information about the lives and intellectual pursuits of our campus community as well as their chosen academic disciplines.

SCUA recently launched Memory Corps, a project to collect oral histories from UMass Amherst alumni.

Finding things in the archives

A comprehensive alphabetical index of UMass departments, programs, and other units, including acronyms. Each entry includes a reference to the archival Record Group where the records can be found.

YouMass is wiki devoted to the life and history of the campus community.

In the summer of 1967, members of University of Massachusetts Amherst campus groups, such as the Faculty Group on War and Peace and the Students for Political Action, joined with individuals from other area colleges and from the community at large to form the Valley Peace Center of Amherst for the purposes of opposing the Vietnam War, providing draft counseling, eliciting pledges from the government to avoid first use of nuclear and biological weapons, and reduction of the power of the “military-industrial complex”. The Center was active for more than five and a half years, drawing its financial support largely from the community and its human resources from student and community volunteers.

Correspondence, minutes, volunteer and membership lists, financial records, newsletters, questionnaires, notes, petitions, clippings, posters, circulars, pamphlets, periodicals, other printed matter, and memorabilia. Includes material relating to alternative service, boycotts, war tax resistance, prison reform, environmental quality, and political candidates.

Born in Boston on March 26, 1934, Dena Dincauze earned her doctorate in archaeology from Harvard University (1967) for research on cremation cemeteries in Eastern Massachusetts. Employed briefly as a Lecturer at Harvard, Dincauze joined the faculty at UMass Amherst in 1967, where she taught until her retirement. Dincauze has conducted field surveys and excavations in Illinois, South Dakota, and England, and for many years, she has specialized on the prehistoric archaeology of eastern and central New England. In 1989, Dincauze traveled to Russia as part of a research exchange to visit Upper Paleolithic sites, and four years later she toured the Pedra Furada sites in Sao Raimundo Nonato, Brazil. Dincauze was named Distinguished Faculty Lecturer and was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal from the University of Massachusetts in 1989, and in 1997 the Society for American Archaeology presented her with the Distinguished Service Award.

The Dincauze Papers include professional correspondence, slides from archaeological digs, travel journals and field notes, as well as notes for teaching and research. Among other items of interest in the collection are a travel journal with corresponding slides and notes documenting her somewhat controversial visit to Russia, and correspondence with a member of the UMass faculty questioning her ability to carry a full course load while simultaneously attending to the demands of motherhood.