Yoshiaki and Fude Yamashita, ca.1904

From 1903 to 1906, Professor Yoshiaki Yamashita of Tokyo traveled the United States providing instruction in the new martial art of judo. In Washington, D.C., he provided instruction for the sons and daughters of the nation’s political and business elite and was brought to the White House to teach President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1905-1906, Yamashita was employed by the U.S. Naval Academy to train midshipmen, but after his contract ended in the fall 1906, he returned to Japan and continued to teach judo until his death on October 26, 1935. He was posthumously awarded the 10th degree black belt, the first ever so honored.

The Yamashita photograph album contains 53 silver developing out prints apparently taken to illustrate various judo throws and holds, along with Yamashita’s calling card and four documents relating to his time teaching judo in Washington.

A native of Sofia, Bulgaria, Theodore Konstantin Yantshev found himself in danger in the years immediately after the Second World War when his anti-Communist activities became known to the new Communist regime. With the assistance of an American naval officer, Yantshev escaped to the United States as a stowaway aboard the American ship S.S. Juliet Victory in the spring of 1946. In July of 1947, however, Yantshev’s presence came to the attention of United States immigration authorities and a warrant for his deportation back to Bulgaria was issued against him.

This small collection consists chiefly of correspondence documenting Yantshev’s struggle to gain permanent residency and then citizenship in the United States.

Ervin H. Zube

Ervin H. Zube was the head of the University’s Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning department (LARP) from 1965-1977. His groundbreaking research on landscape architecture and assessment helped define the international importance and influence of the field and his consultancy work, most notably with the National Park Service, brought his intellectual achievements into practical application. Born on April 24, 1931 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Zube earned his B.S. at the University of Wisconsin in 1954. After a two year service in the United States Air Force, Zube enrolled in Harvard’s Graduate School of Design where he received his M.L.A in 1959. Zube held teaching positions at the University of Wisconsin and the University of California, Berkeley before beginning his ten year professorship at the University of Massachusetts in 1965. As the head of LARP, Zube established the Environmental Design program, which introduced a revolutionary cross-discipline approach to the study of landscape architecture. Zube became the director of the Institute for Man and the Environment in 1972 and restructured the institute to support academic research in new, important topics including community development and cooperation with the National Park Service, seeding important national and international institutions with progressively educated researchers. As a consultant, Zube helped the National Park Service develop their “master plan” for Yosemite and worked with numerous national and international institutions to manage and assess their environmental resources. Zube ended his career as a professor at the University of Arizona where he retired in 1983. He remained active in the field until his death in 2001.

The Ervin H. Zube papers include Zube’s lecture notes and academic correspondence, research materials and publications representing his work in landscape assessment and architecture, notes and reports from his consultancy work with many institutions and committees, correspondence from his role as a conference planner, as well as correspondence relating to his many book reviews. Zube’s papers also cover his research and teaching while at the University of Arizona and contain photographs from his research on the Connecticut River Valley.

Ed Abbe in Bora Bora, 1987

Born in Syracuse, N.Y., in 1915 and raised largely in Hampton, Va., Edward Abbe seemed destined to be an engineer. The great nephew of Elihu Thomson, an inventor and founding partner in General Electric, and grandson of Edward Folger Peck, an early employee of a precursor of that firm, Abbe came from a family with a deep involvement in electrification and the development of street railways. After prepping at the Rectory and Kent Schools, Abbe studied engineering at the Sheffield School at Yale, and after graduation in 1938, accepted a position with GE. For 36 years, he worked in the Industrial Control Division in New York and Virginia, spending summers at the family home on Martha’s Vineyard. After retirement in 1975, he and his wife Gladys traveled frequently, cruising both the Atlantic and Pacific.

Ranging from an extensive correspondence from his high school and college days to materials relating to his family’s involvement in engineering, the Abbe collection offers an in depth perspective on an educated family. An avid traveler and inveterate keeper, Ed Abbe gathered a diverse assemblage of letters, diaries, and memorabilia relating to the history of the Abbe, Peck, Booth, Gifford, and Boardman families. The collection is particularly rich in visual materials, including albums and photographs, depicting homes, travel, and family life over nearly a century.

During the academic year 1986-1987, the campus at UMass Amherst was a hotbed of political protest, fueled in part by the US intervention in Central America. The arrival on campus of a CIA recruiting officer in November set off a string of demonstrations that attracted the support of activists Abbie Hoffman and Amy Carter, daughter of former president Jimmy Carter. The occupation of the Whitmore Administration Building was followed by a larger occupation of adjacent Munson Hall, resulting in a number of arrests. Hoffman, Carter, and eleven co-defendants were tried and acquitted on charges of disorderly conduct were tried in April 1987.

The Collection contains 61 mounted photographs of marches, demonstrations, and protests in Amherst and Northampton, Mass., taken by Charles F. Carroll, Byrne Guarnotta, and Libby Hubbard, all students at UMass Amherst. The photographs are a vivid record of campus and community activism, and particularly the mobilization against the CIA and American intervention in Central America, as well as the arrest and trial of Abbie Hoffman and Amy Carter.

Mark Bartlett Aldrich was employed for many years at the Montague Rod and Reel Co. in Montague City. His grandfather, Eugene Bartlett, was the founder of the firm, which made split-bamboo fishing rods. He owned and operated Aldrich’s New England store from 1948 until selling it in 1962. Aldrich then sold cars for Spenser Brothers Ford in Northfield until he and his wife Edith moved to Florida in 1964.

The collection consists primarily of family records relating to the wedding, anniversaries, and funerals of Edith and Mark Aldrich. The Aldrich Family Papers are organized into three series: Wedding and Anniversaries, Funeral and Legal, and Personal.

Arlene Avakian

Arlene Avakian arrived at UMass in 1972 as a graduate student working on the social history of American women, but quickly became a key figure in the creation of the university’s new program in Women’s Studies. As she completed her MA in History (1975) and EdD (1985), she helped in the early organization of the program, later joining the faculty as professor and program director. Through her research and teaching, she contributed to an engaging departmental culture in which the intersection of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality were placed at the center, building the program over the course of 35 years into the nationally-recognized Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Avakian has written and taught on topics ranging from the lives and experiences of Armenian American and African American women to culinary history and the construction of whiteness. She retired in May 2011.

Documenting the growth and development of Women’s Studies at UMass Amherst, the collection includes valuable material on the creation of the department (and Women’s Studies more generally), second- and third-wave feminism, and Avakian’s teaching and research. The collection includes a range of correspondence, memoranda, notes, and drafts of articles, along with several dozen oral historical interviews with Armenian American women. Also noteworthy is the extensive documentation of ABODES, the Amherst Based Organization to Develop Equitable Shelter, which established the Pomeroy Lane Cooperative Housing Community in South Amherst in 1994.

Joseph and Martha Bajgier at Bell Market, Chicopee, 1937

On March 13, 1903, Joseph Michael Bajgier was born in Odrzykon, Poland, the youngest of three sons in a farming family. Schooled only through the third grade, Joseph served as a young man in the First Air Division of the Polish Army before following his older brother in emigrating to the United States in 1927. Settling in Chicopee, Mass., with its large and active Polish community, Bajgier began work as a slaughterer of pigs for a meat processing company, but within a few years, he had saved enough money to purchase a small grocery store in Longmeadow. In about 1935, he returned to Chicopee, purchasing a grocery and deli, Bell Market, that his family ran for 36 years. Bajgier was deeply involved in the local Polish community as a member of the Polish National Alliance, the Holy Name Society of St. Stanislaus Parish, and an organization of Polish veterans in exile (Stowarzyszenie Polskich Kombatantow). He and his wife Martha (Misiaszek) had two sons, Casimir and Edward

The Bajgier collection documents the lives of a Polish family in Chicopee, Mass., from the time of immigration through the 1970s. The core of the collection surrounds the life of Joseph Bajgier, and includes a number of documents and a diary from the time of his emigration in 1927, a fascinating series of letters from relatives in Turaszowka, Poland before and after the Second World War, and several photographs of the family and their business in Chicopee.

In the fall 1987, a working group was formed in Boston to help coordinate planning for HIV-related services, prevention, and education. The Boston AIDS Consortium began operations the following January with the goal of ensuring effective services for people affected by HIV/AIDS and enabling them to live healthy and productive lives. In its eighteen year existence, the Consortium worked with over seventy public and private agencies and two hundred individuals.

The Records of the Boston AIDS Consortium provide valuable insight into community-based mobilization in response to the AIDS epidemic.

A free-lance garden and landscape writer, Georgene A. Bramlage has published widely on garden and food-related topics and has been a member of the Garden Writers Association since 1980. She is the wife of William A. Bramlage, a member of the faculty in Plant and Soil Sciences at UMass Amherst. Long-time residents of Leverett, Mass., the Bramlages relocated to Roanoke, Va., in 2009.

An avid local historian, Bramlage collected pamphlets and ephemeral publications relating to the history of her town. This small collection includes a few items relating to the town’s bicentennial in 1974, newspaper clippings, genealogical information, and articles on its residents, and items relating to civic affairs in town. Several cookbooks donated by Bramlage were transferred to the McIntosh Cookbook Collection.