A carpenter by trade and a farmer, Timothy Cushing lived in Cohasset, Massachusetts, throughout most of his adult life. Born on Feb 2, 1738, the eighth child of Samuel Cushing, a selectman and Justice of the Peace from the second district in Hingham (now Cohasset), Cushing married Desire Jenkins (b. 1745) on June 4, 1765, and raised a considerable family of eleven children. During the Revolutionary War, he served for a brief period in companies raised in Cohasset, but otherwise remained at home, at work, until his death on December 26, 1806.

Cushing’s accounts offer a fine record of the activities of a workaday carpenter during the first decades of the early American republic, reflecting both his remarkable industry and the flexibility with which he approached earning a living. The work undertaken by Cushing centers on two areas of activity — carpentry and farm work — but within those areas, the range of activities is quite broad. As a carpenter, Cushing set glass in windows, hung shutters, made coffins, hog troughs, and window seats; he worked on horse carts and sleds, barn doors, pulled down houses and framed them, made “a Little chair” and a table, painted sashes, hewed timber, made shingles, and worked on a dam. As a farm worker, he was regularly called upon to butcher calves and bullocks, to garden, mow hay, plow, make cider, and perform many other tasks, including making goose quill pens. The crops he records reflect the near-coastal setting: primarily flax, carrots, turnips, corn, and potatoes, with references throughout to cattle and sheep. During some periods, Cushing records selling fresh fish, including haddock and eels.

Steve Diamond, Ray Mungo, and
Susan Dalsimer, ca.1969

Famous Long Ago launched the literary career of Raymond Mungo with a splash, but even before the book had reached the shelves, he turned to his next project. In October 1969, Mungo began planning for a memoir of his life at the Packer Corners commune. Soon entitled Total Loss Farm, the book would become a classic in the literature of the 1960s counterculture. Signing a contract in November with E.P. Dutton, he worked with a young and sympathetic editor, Susan Stern (later Susan Dalsimer).

This small, but rich collection consists of a series of letters between Raymond Mungo and his editor at E.P. Dutton, Susan Stern, regarding his ideas on writing and life. Beginning in October 1969 with editorial commentary on Famous Long Ago and Mungo’s additions, the Dalsimer Papers offer insight into the development of Total Loss Farm from concept to printed page.

Captain Joseph Hooker Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution of Enfield, Massachusetts. The single volume consists of five entries, which include two obituaries of members, two notices of prizes given or received during the Enfield Centennial Celebration, and a record of the Chapter’s services during World War I.

Tom Deary was an union organizer for the IUE, serving on the executive board of Local 201 at the GE Plant in Lynn, Massachusetts. Involved in the 1969-1970 strike, Deary joined the IUE staff in 1971 and served for 30 years as an organizer, negotiator, and strike leader in the northeast and southern states. Frequently at odds with union careerists, he built a small labor newspaper in the 1980s into one with a regional focus, New England Labor News and Commentary.

The Deary papers include organizer reports, correspondence, IUE election campaign literature, and oral histories and videotapes. Letters, financial records, and business plans document Deary’s establishment of a regional labor newspaper, the New England Labor News and Commentary.

After receiving her MA from the University of Oregon in 1951, Madeline De Frees embarked on a career teaching English and writing to students ranging in age from elementary school to college (University of Montana, Seattle University). Joining the faculty at UMass Amherst in 1979, she served as Director of the MFA program in Creative Writing from 1980 to 1983, retiring in 1985.

The DeFrees Papers are a collection of personal and professional correspondence, poems and other writings, interviews and photographs. Biographical materials, financial records, and interviews comprise the remainder of the collection.

As a member of the faculty in the English Department at UMass Amherst in 1972, Arlyn Diamond became one of the founding members of the Program in Women’s Studies. A scholar of medieval European literature, Diamond received her doctorate from Berkeley in 1970 and became an early proponent of feminist criticism. Among other works, she was author of Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism (1988) and editor (with Lee Edwards) of American Voices, American Women (1973). Diamond retired from the University in 2004.

This small collection consists primarily of notes for research and teaching. Of particular interest is a series of women’s studies bibliographies, readings for the Five College Women’s Studies Faculty Seminar (Autumn 1977), graduate level feminist theory courses, and notes related to the history of women’s studies. Also included among the papers are financial records from the 1977 Five College Women’s Studies Faculty Seminar.

Digital UMass contains the results of several initiatives to document the history of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and its predecessors the Massachusetts Agricultural College and Massachusetts State College. In addition to an on-going project to capture the oral history of the University’s administrators and reflections on student life, the archives has digitized materials relating to the early years of co-education at MAC and women’s education at the University. Additional materials will be added as they become available.

Annual Reports, 1864-1932/33

College Monthly

Student newspaper, 1887-1889

Distinguished Visitors Program, 1972-1979

Invited lectures on current topics by distinguished speakers (audio files in mp3 format).

Oral Histories

• Barnard, Ellsworth and Mary, Classes of 1928 and 1934
  Transcript
  Audio:

  Barnard oral history
• Bromery, Randolph W., Chancellor
  Audio:

  Oral history
• Class of 1919: Mary E. Garvey, Willard K. French, Anna Liebman Shore, E. Sidney Stockwell
  Transcript
  Audio:

  Class of 1919 oral history
• Conant, Eudora V., Nutritionist and wife of Ralph Van Meter, UMass President, 1947-1954
  Transcript
  Audio:

  Conant oral history
• Curtis, Helen, Dean of Women, 1945-1973
  Transcript
• McLaughlin, Fred, Class of 1911.
  Audio:

  McLaughlin oral history
• Mitchell, Helen, Nutritionist; Dean, School of Home Economics
  Transcript
• Rand, Mrs. Frank Prentice, wife of Frank Prentice Rand, poet, writer, and UMass Professor of English. Reminiscences about Robert Frost, faculty lives, MAC.
  Audio:

  Rand oral history
• Wheeler, Mae Holden, Class of 1916
  Transcript

President Kenyon L. Butterfield

• Selected records related to women’s education at Massachusetts Agricultural College, 1906-1924

Dean of the College William L. Machmer

• Selected records related to women’s affairs at the Massachusetts Agricultural College (MAC), Massachusetts State College (MSC), and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, 1924-1951

Student Handbooks, 1890-1950

• (See also Record Group 45/4: Women’s Student Government Association — Handbooks for Women)

Student Affairs — Dean of Women Helen Curtis

• Records, 1902-1993 (bulk, 1940-1973)

Student Affairs

• Advisory Council of Women. Records, 1921-1964
• Women in Agriculture. Records, 1917-1958

Faculty Papers

• Hicks, Adeline. Papers, 1917-1987
• Skinner, Edna L. Papers, 1930-1997

Women’s Student Government Association

• Handbooks for Women, 1925/27-1941
  
  (See also Record Group 30/00/2: Student Handbooks, 1890-1950)

Student Research Papers:

• Keith, Vicky, “Mass Aggie Women, 1910-1923” (Fall 1983)
• O’Donnell, Robert, “Undergraduate Women and the Post-War College: The University of Massachusetts” (December 3, 1996)

Bold Stroke for a Wife

Since its founding, Double Edge Theatre has embraced a two-fold mission: to develop and promote the highest quality of original theatre performance, and to create a permanent center of performance, practice, training research, and cultural exchange.

The collection documents the Theatre’s focus on research, international collaboration, and the elevation of artistic performance above and beyond stage work into the realm of cultural exchange.

Soldier in Revolutionary War and Shays Rebellion, later a state legislator and local politician from Grafton and Marlboro, Massachusetts. Drury’s papers contain family and business (farm and mill) correspondence, notes of hand, bills, receipts, and legal papers as well as records pertaining to the town of Grafton. Collection also includes papers of Timothy Darling and the Goulding, Place, and Sherman families.

W.E.B. Du Bois

Scholar, writer, editor of The Crisis and other journals, co-founder of the Niagara Movement, the NAACP, and the Pan African Congresses, international spokesperson for peace and for the rights of oppressed minorities, W.E.B. Du Bois was a son of Massachusetts who articulated the strivings of African Americans and developed a trenchant analysis of the problem of the color line in the twentieth century.

The Du Bois Papers contain almost 165 linear feet of the personal and professional papers of a remarkable social activist and intellectual. Touching on all aspects of his long life from his childhood during Reconstruction through the end of his life in 1963, the collection reflects the extraordinary breadth of his social and academic commitments from research in sociology to poetry and plays, from organizing for social change to organizing for Black consciousness.