A former Professor of English at UMass Amherst and contributor to the Program in Women’s Studies, Margaret (Margo) Culley was a specialist in women’s literature, particularly in women’s autobiography and diaries as a literary form. Her research drew variously upon work in literature, history, American studies, and religion, exploring gender and genre, language, subjectivity, memory, cultural diversity, and narrative. Between 1985 and 1994, she edited three volumes on American women’s autobiographical writing, and another on feminist teaching in the college classroom.

The Culley Papers offer a somewhat fragmentary glimpse into Culley’s academic career and her commitments to women’s literature. The collection includes selected notes for research and teaching, annotated bibliographies of women’s literature, a performance script for The Voices of Lost New England Women Writers, a federal grant proposal for The Black Studies/Women’s Studies Faculty Development Project (1981), and notes related to a study on minority women in the classroom. Letters collected by Culley’s students (late 18th and early 19th century) have been separated from the collection and designated as manuscript collections.

Farmers who provided services (such as putting up fences, shingling, butchering, and cutting brush) for townspeople. Seventy page book of business transactions, and miscellaneous papers including mortgage payments, highway building surveyor assessments, and poems.

Author, editor, and professor, Mary Doyle Curran published her only novel, The Parish and the Hill, in 1948. The collection includes unpublished drafts of novels and short stories; photographs; correspondence from family and friends; publishers and literary associates such as Saul Bellow and Josephine Herbst.

Hardware store merchant, stove dealer, and tinsmith from Haverhill, Massachusetts. Daybooks include documentation of customers, items purchased, prices paid, and transactions relating to Currier’s rag trade.

Operator of a general store in Cambridgeport, Vermont, as well as a postmaster and a deacon of the Congregational Church. Daybook includes lists of stock, how he acquired his goods, and method and form of payment (cash or exchange of goods and services).

Farmer from Cohasset, a shipbuilding and fishing town in eastern Massachusetts. Includes customer accounts, the services he performed (such as plowing up and hauling field stones to the wharf, and carting wood, merchandise, and iron), products he sold (potatoes and calves), and documentation of a hired Irish-born laborer.

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.

A member of the Massachusetts Agricultural College class of 1907, Frederick A. Cutter participated in football, basketball, and baseball as a student, and was a member of Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity.

The Cutter collection contains photographs of the 1907 football team, the 1906 and 1907 members of Phi Sigma Kappa, and it includes a uniform from the M.A.C. basketball team, 1907, Massachusetts pennants and banners, a Lowell High School sweater from 1902, and early M.A.C. football equipment, including cleats and a nose guard.

Born in Poland, Josephine Latonsinska emigrated with her parents to the U.S. at the age of two. After studies at the Booth and Bayliss Commercial College in Waterbury, Connecticut, Josephine worked as a secretary for a Waterbury firm. Married to Joseph Czaja in 1926, the couple moved to Springfield, Massachusetts where Joseph worked as a druggist. Trained as a musician, Mrs. Czaja was an active member of the St. Cecilia Choir and the Ladies Guild, both of Our Lady of the Rosary Church.

The collection consists of photocopies of news clippings, probably compiled as a series of scrapbooks by Mrs. Czaja, depicting the activities of Polish community of Springfield from 1936 to 1987.