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.

Founded by Heneage Mandell in 1884, the London Playgoers Club met regularly “to afford members facilities for Critical Theatrical Discussions … in the form of … debate[s].” Playgoers at the time were stereotyped as abrasive at best and dangerous at worst. Mandell and his colleagues sought to rid themselves of this reputation and nurture a relationship between the players and the playgoers.

Contained within this collection are meeting minutes from 1884 to 1892, a list of all members who ran in club elections, as well as a brief handwritten history of the club.

Collection documenting Polish American culture, language, and history consisting of newspapers and news clippings, programs for Polish religious and cultural events, newsletters of Polish American organizations, and Polish publications including religious works and language textbooks.

“The province of protozoa, reminiscent of the fertile crescent in the Middle East, straddles the highways of thought that run between the major continents of biology. Down these roads come caravans of concepts and analogies: ideas about hierarchies and taxonomies from one direction, convictions about the basic structures and functions of life from another, opinions about reproduction and development from a third, and theories of the origin and evolution of life’s forms from still another quarter. It is uncanny how these separate trains of thought intersect one another in the land of the single-celled organisms. There they interact, exchange views, and rearrange their loads before they disperse again to inform other regions of biology of their contents and conclusions. A complete history of protozoology must recognize the centrality of this terrain.”

Frederick B. Churchill. 1989. “Toward the History of Protozoology,” Journal of the History of Biology 22: 185-187.

Protistology (formerly called protozoology) is the scientific study of unicellular eukaryotes and their relatives — single cells as living organisms. Protists make up 57 of the 60 distinct “ultrastructural identities” of eukaryotes, with the macroscopic forms most familiar to us (plants, animals and fungi) nestled amongst the other three (Simpson and Patterson, 2007). An extraordinarily diverse assemblage of organisms, protists have distinctive genetic systems, numerous primary, secondary, and tertiary levels of symbiosis, and unique cytoskeletons, and they play important roles in food webs and as pathogens. Among them are some of the most serious human parasites, including the malaria parasites Plasmodium spp., Leishmania, Trypanosoma, Entamoeba and Trichomonas. Many protists, such as Chlamydomonas, Tetrahymena, and Dictyostelium, have become important experimental organisms in scientific and medical research.

What do the Protistology Collections include?

The collection consists of five maps prepared by the Massachusetts Metropolitan District Water Supply Commission of the anticipated site of the Quabbin Reservoir, some with hand-written notations, and one map showing the route of Boston’s water supply.

Collection of clippings from Quabbin town newspapers, including Dana, Enfield, Greenwich, Millington, and Prescott. Many clippings chronicle the final days of the towns razed to make way for the reservoir, including the popular series “Letters from Quabbin” published in The Springfield Union in 1938, which recorded the history of the formation of the Quabbin Reservoir from the selection of its location and the plans for its construction to the relocation of houses and neighbors and the disbanding of local organizations and communities.

Born into a Jewish family in the town of Buzau, Romania, the endocrinologist and psychopathologist Ionel Florian Rapaport entered the University of Paris in 1937 to study under the eminent psychologists Maxime Laignel-Lavastine and Charles Blondel. Surviving the war by posing as a Christian, he completed a dissertation on ritual castration, Les Faits de castration rituelle, essai sur les formes pathologiques de la conscience collective (1945), which was published three years later as Introduction à la psychopathologie collective : la secte mystique des Skoptzy. In 1953, Rapaport emigrated to the United States and joined the faculty at the Psychiatric Institute of the University of Wisconsin, where he became noted for research into the social aspects of mental disorders and juvenile delinquency. It was there in 1956, that he discovered a statistical correlation between the incidence of Down Syndrome and exposure to fluorides, a study that became widely cited by opponents of fluoridation of the water supply and widely criticized by proponents. Rapaport died of cancer in 1972.

The Rapaport Papers contain a large quantity of raw data, research notes and correspondence relating to over two decades of research into mental disorders, centered largely upon his study of the link between Down Syndrome and fluoridation. Due to the potential sensitivities of some material in the collection, researchers must agree not to reveal the names of any patients before gaining access.

After completing postdoctoral work in Germany under Nobel laureate E.O. Fischer, Marvin Rausch joined the Chemistry faculty at UMass Amherst in 1963. A scholar in organometallic chemistry of the transition metals, Rausch wrote over 150 articles during his career, and became one of the first chairs of the Organometallic Subdivision of the American Chemical Society’s Division of Inorganic Chemistry as well as the Permanent International Secretary of the International Conference on Organometallic Chemistry. A passionate collector of minerals and fan of the basketball team, he remained in Amherst until his death in May 2008.

The Rausch Papers document the latter part of Rausch’s long career as an organic chemist and Professor of Chemistry at UMass. In addition to extensive notes for research and teaching, Rausch’s papers include his professional and personal correspondence, committee notes, patents, and annual performance reports. Also included among the papers are research progress reports, information regarding a NATO grant awarded in 1995, and several molecular models that represent some of Rausch’s work in organic chemistry.

In Memory of the Orphans

A folklorist at Indiana University Kokomo for many years, Susanne S. Ridlen is noted for her research on grave markers in the Midwest. Her dissertation at Indiana University was on tombstones carved to mimic tree-stumps, a rustic form of funerary monument that enjoyed a vogue during the late nineteenth century. Ridlen’s research culminated in publication of her book Tree-Stump Tombstones: A Field Guide to Rustic Funerary Art in Indiana (Kokomo, 1999).

The Ridlen collection provides an extensive visual record of tree-stump tombstones in Indiana. Organized by county, town, and cemetery, the collection typically includes several views of each marker along with documentation of the individual(s) interred, the date of creation, inscriptions, and any other design motifs employed. These images and data form the basis for Ridlen’s Tree-Stump Tombstones.