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)

1929 cookbook

Assembled by Lynnette E. Foucher, this collection consists chiefly of cookbooks produced by food companies between the 1920s-1970s. These cookbooks reflect the changing role of women in the home as well as new food trends and innovative technology. Taken together, the collection offers a glimpse into the way meal preparation changed in the U.S. during the second half of the twentieth century and how this change transformed the way we eat today.

During the 1870s, William A. Adams maintained a blacksmithing shop close to the intersection of Walnut and Hickory Streets in Springfield, Mass. His trade ran from farriery to repairing iron work, wheels, and wagons, and situated as he was near the southern end of Watershops Pond, one of the industrial centers of the city, his customers ranged from local residents to manufacturing firms, the city, and the Armory.

The Adams account book contains approximately 150 pages containing brief records of blacksmithing work for a range of customers located in the immediate area. Among the more names mentioned are the grocers Perkins and Nye, W. and E.W. Pease Co., J. Kimberley and Co., and Common Councilman William H. Pinney and J. W. Lull, all of whom can be located within a few blocks of Adams’ shop.

As a staffer for Congressman Silvio Conte, Angelo researched numerous small business and economic development issues, both for constituents and for national legislation, prepared subcommittee and committee hearings, and wrote numerous articles and floor statements for Conte. The collection provides an overview of Conte’s work with and for small businesses, as well as Angelo’s contributions to the Small Business Act.

Protist

Born in New York City in 1914, William Balamuth enjoyed a long career in protistology. Introduced to the field as a graduate student in Harold Kirby’s laboratory at the University of California Berkeley, Balamuth received his dissertation in 1939 for a study of regeneration in the heterotrichous marine ciliate, Licnophora macfarlandi. After several years at the University of Missouri and Northwestern, he returned to Berkeley in 1953 to replace his mentor. During the course of his career, Balamuth worked on fundamental issues in the biology of organisms ranging from parasitic amoebae to amoeboflagellates, publishing over 80 papers on culturing, nutritional requirements, cell cycling, and encystment. He died suddenly on June 10, 1981.

The Balamuth Collection consists of 114 drawings of ciliates prepared by William Balamuth for use in courses and publications between the 1930s and early 1960s, along with a handful of offprints of articles and scattered research notes.

Transcripts of Civil War diaries of Samuel Chapin and William R. Sessions both of South Wilbraham, Massachusetts. Chapin was twenty-one and Sessions twenty-seven when they enlisted in the Union Army with 25 other Wilbraham men on August 29, 1862. They were assigned to the 46th Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteers for nine months service.

Merchant and shoemaker from the Byfield Parish of Newbury, Massachusetts and Boscawen, New Hampshire. Includes accounts of the prices paid for shoemaking and agricultural labor, accounts of the men and women who worked for his father’s shoe store and factory, notes of who lived in the younger Colman’s home, a page mentioning his move to New Hampshire, and accounts of agricultural produce sales and exchange of farm labor.

A druggist by training, William Denslow became interested in botany as a means of combating tuberculosis through outdoor exercise. As his interests developed, Denslow amassed an herbarium that included between 11,000 and 15,000 specimens, including both American and European species.

The Denslow collection consists of a single volume of manuscripts, chiefly letters, collected from significant botanists and other individuals, including William Henry Brewer, Mordecai Cubitt Cooke, Asa Gray, Isaac Hollister Hall, Thomas P. James, Horace Mann, Edward Sylvester Morse, Charles Horton Peck, George Edward Post, Frederick Ward Putnam, George Thurber, and John Torrey.

William K. Hefner

In 1960, William K. Hefner (1915-1993) became one of the first of new breed of radical pacifists to run for elective office, when he ran as a peace candidate for Congress in the 1st district of Massachusetts. An accountant from Greenfield, Hefner was involved at a national level with movements for peace and civil rights. An early member of SANE, a founder of Political Action for Peace in 1959 (now CPPAX) and the Greenfield Peace Center (1963), and an active member of the American Friends Service Committee, War Resisters League, Turn Toward Peace, and the World Without War Conference, Hefner was an energetic force in the movements for peace and disarmament, civil rights, and a more just economic system. He ran unsuccessfully for office in three elections between 1960 and 1964, and supported peace candidate H. Stuart Hughes in his bid for election to the U.S. Senate in 1962.

The Hefner papers offer a remarkable record of politically-engaged activism for peace and social justice in the early 1960s. With an intensely local focus, Hefner was tied in to the larger movements at the state and national level, corresponding with major figures such as A.J. Muste, Bayard Rustin, Benjamin Spock, and Arthur Springer. The collection includes particularly rich documentation of the early years of Political Action for Peace, which Hefner helped found, with correspondence, minutes of meetings, and publications, as well as equally rich materials on Hefner’s bids for congress in 1960 and 1962.

William E. Heronemus underwent a radical transformation during his tenure as Professor of Civil Engineering at the University. After serving in the U.S. Navy, engineering the construction of submarines from 1941 until his retirement in 1965, Heronemus disavowed his work with nuclear energy and joining the University faculty in 1967, dedicated his life to the study of alternative energy. Born in Madison, Wisconsin, Heronemus earned his B.S. from then United States Naval Academy and two M.S.s (Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering), from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Heronemus was invited to the University to help develop a research program in Ocean Engineering and focused his work on alternative energy to sources that could make use of oceanic power. William Heronemus retired from the University in 1978 and died of cancer on November 2, 2002.

The William E. Heronemus Papers document his research in alternative energy and his quest for harnessing wind and thermal power from the ocean through technical reports on alternative energy systems written from 1972 to 1974.