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.

Shortly after earning his doctorate in plant pathology from Cornell in 1954, the internationally known phytopathologist, Francis W. Holmes began his career at UMass Amherst. Working in the Department of Plant Pathology (1954-1991) and later as Director of the Shade Tree Laboratories, Holmes became a leader in the study of Dutch elm disease, and he conducted important research on injury to trees from road salt and the relationship between salt injury and Verticillium wilt disease. During Holmes’s tenure, the Shade Tree Labs tested nearly 250,000 elm samples for Dutch elm disease and diagnosed a great variety of other diseases on more than 150 other types of trees. While on a Fulbright fellowship in the Netherlands, he devoted his free time to preparing a monograph on six Dutch women scientists who discovered the source of Dutch elm disease in the 1920s and 1930s. Holmes retired from the University in 1991 and remained in Amherst until his death in 2007.

The papers document Holmes’s research on shade trees and his tenure as a professor of microbiology. The collection includes some professional correspondence (1954-1977), awards, research notes and publications, and memorabilia. Holmes’s translations of phytopathological works from Dutch to English may be of interest to scholars of Dutch elm disease.

Bronislaw Honigberg was a parasitologist who, though studying the intestinal parasites of amphibians, provided research for the U.S. Department of Public Health’s infections diseases lab. Born in Warsaw, Poland in 1920, Honigberg fled to the United States at the beginning of World War II, cutting short his Polish medical education to become an undergraduate at the University of California Berkeley, where he earned his B.A. (1943), M.A (1946) and Ph.D. (1960). Honigberg joined the University faculty in 1961 and taught in the zoology department until his death in 1992.

The collection is comprised of Honigberg’s lecture notes, including exams, lab exercises, and illustrative material. There is also five folder of reprints spanning the years 1949 to 1991 and thus representing Honigberg’s research throughout his career.

A member of the Massachusetts State College Class of 1936, Leonta Gertrude Horrigan was affiliated with UMass Amherst throughout her long career in academia. After receiving he MA from Smith College in 1942 for a thesis on DeQuincy and Milton, Horrigan taught creative writing, composition, among writing classes, to UMass undergraduates, and was frequently singled out as a favorite instructor on campus. In 1964, she was appointed Assistant Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, and retired to emeritus status in 1986.

The Horrigan Papers contain nearly a half century record of instruction in writing education at UMass, with a wide array of other materials relating to Horrigan’s varied interest, events on campus, and to the evolution of the university in the post-war years.

David R. Inglis at Argonne N.L., ca.1953

David R. Inglis enjoyed a distinguished career in nuclear physics that ranged from theoretical work on the structure of the nucleus in the 1930s to the development of the atomic bomb in the 1940s and work on renewable energy in the 1960s and 1970s. A Professor of Physics at UMass from 1969-1975, Inglis was a founding member of the Federation of American Scientists and from the mid-1940s on, he dedicated himself to informing public policy on the dangers of nuclear technologies.

The Inglis Papers offer a perspective on the life and career of a theoretical physicist who grew from an early involvement in the Manhattan Project to becoming a committed critic of nuclear weaponry and nuclear power. Although the collection is relatively sparse in unpublished scientific work, it includes valuable correspondence relating to Inglis’s efforts with the Federation of American Scientists and other organizations to influence public policy on issues relating to disarmament and nuclear power.

Frederick Painter Jeffrey was born in the coal mining town of Trauger, Pennsylvania in February 1911. Jeffrey received a BA in poultry husbandry at Pennsylvania State College in 1932 and then an MS in poultry genetics at Massachusetts State College in 1934. Jeffrey became a professor of Poultry Science at Rutgers University from 1935-1944; after leaving Rutgers, Jeffrey became a professor in the Poultry Science Department at the University of Massachusetts, a department he later headed. In 1954 he became the Dean of the Stockbridge School of Agriculture, a position he held until his retirement in 1971. Frederick Painter Jeffrey died in September 1997.

The Frederick Painter Jeffrey Papers include materials about his work with Bantam chickens and document his tenure at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. There are also limited materials related to his family and schooling.

Over the course of his esteemed dance career, Richard Jones performed with Eleo Pomare Company, the Miguel Godreau Dance Company, and the Xochipillian Dance Group. Jones was appointed to the staff of the University of Massachusetts on September 1, 1973, and remained with the department until his death in 1991. While at the University, Jones was the founding artistic director of the Amdans Theater, and was the artistic director of the University Dancers from 1979 to 1991.

The Jones Papers are a collection of photographs and reviews of Jones’s choreography during the 1970s and 1980s. A copy of Jones’s original essay, “Costuming for Three Styles of Dance,” (circa 1975) appears in the collection, as do photographs, playbills, posters, Amdans Theatre and University Dancers reviews. The Papers also contain letters to Jones from the Boston Ballet and the American College Dance Festival, as well as reviews of Jones’s choreography for professional companies outside the University.

A poet, expert on the works of Hemingway, Robert Francis, and D.H. Lawrence, and a 1953 graduate of the University, Donald Junkins directed the Master of Fine Arts in English program from 1966. Junkins juggled his career as a poet with his work at the University, focusing his teaching energy on literature, not creative writing, to save his creative resources. Before turning his energies to poetry, Junkins studied theology at Boston University School of Theology. While a student, Junkins met poet Robert Francis, took courses with Robert Lowell and, discovering his love of poetry through these contacts, Junkins life path was forever changed. After leaving Boston University, Junkins taught creative writing at Chico State University before coming to the University.

The Donald Junkins Papers document some of his creative output while at the University through a collection of literary journals containing his poetry, drafts of poems, published and unpublished with notes and galley proofs of his poetry collection And Sandpipers She Said, published by The University of Massachusetts Press in 1970. Two mimeographed publications of student poems represent his teaching work at Chico State University.

Sidney Kaplan, May 1972

An eminent scholar of African American history and activist, Sidney Kaplan was raised in New York City and graduated from City College in 1942. After wartime service as a Lieutenant in the Army, Kaplan returned to his education, completing an MA in history from Boston University (1948) and PhD at Harvard (1960), taking up the study of African American history at a time when few white scholars showed interest. Joining the English Department at UMass in 1946, Kaplan’s influence was widely felt at UMass Amherst and in the local community: he was among the founders of the Department of Afro-American Studies, a founder of the UMass Press, a founder and editor of the Massachusetts Review, and he was the editor of Leonard Baskin’s Gehenna Press. Over more than thirty years at UMass, he worked on diverse projects in history, literature, and the arts, often in partnership with his wife Emma Nogrady, a librarian at Smith College whom he married in 1933, ranging from studies of Poe and Melville to a biographical dictionary of African Americans and a study of Shays’ Rebellion. In 1973, they were co-authors of the first comprehensive study of depictions of African Americans in the visual arts, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution (based on an exhibition planned for the National Portrait Gallery), and in 1991, the UMass Press published a collection of Sidney’s essays, American Studies in Black and White. A Fulbright lecturer in Greece and Yugoslavia and exchange Professor at the University of Kent, Kaplan was the recipient of the Bancroft Award from the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History for best article of the year in the Journal of Negro History, and he was awarded the UMass Amherst Chancellor’s Medal in 1979, one year after his retirement. Sidney Kaplan died in 1993 at age 80 and was followed by Emma in 2010.

The Kaplan Papers document a long career devoted to the study of African American history and life. The extensive correspondence, research notes, and drafts of articles and other materials offer important insight into the growth of African American studies from the 1950s through 1970s as well as the growth of UMass Amherst into a major research university.

Bears

Born in Syracuse, New York, in 1927, David C. Knapp studied at Syracuse University (BA, 1947) and the University of Chicago (M.A., 1948; PhD, 1953)., before joining the faculty in government at the University of New Hampshire. Recognized as an able administrator from early in his career, Knapp was appointed assistant to the university president and then Dean of the College of Liberal Arts (1961-1962). Leaving UNH in 1963, he served successively as associate director of the Study of American Colleges of Agriculture, director of the Institute of College and University Administrators of the American Council on Education, and Dean of the New York State College of Human Ecology at Cornell University (1968-1974) before being elected president of the University of Massachusetts in 1978. He retired in 1990.

The Knapp Papers consist primarily of materials relating to efforts in the early 1990s to designate Hokkaido and Massachusetts as sister states, to celebrate the long relationship Between UMass and the University of Hokkaido, and to commemorate the legacy of Benjamin Smith Lyman. In addition to correspondence with the Massachusetts Hokkaido Society and Hokkaido University, the collection includes memorabilia associated with Knapp’s connections with Japan.