1922 Commencement -100 Years Ago

As commencement approaches this year, I look back on commencement of 100 years ago. At that time there were two textile schools, Bradford Durfee Textile School (BDTS) and the New Bedford Textile School (NBTS). One graduated 32 day students with diplomas from one of the courses of study offered at that time. The other graduated 27. BDTS had five courses of study: General Cotton Manufacturing, Designing and Weaving, Chemistry and Dyeing, Engineering, and Freehand Drawing and Painting. NBTS had six: General Cotton Manufacturing, Chemistry, Dyeing and Finishing, Designing, Carding and Spinning, Seamless Hosiery Knitting, and Latch Needle Underwear Knitting. There were a total of only six women across both day schools. Women at that time generally took the freehand drawing and textile design classes, which today we would refer to as “surface pattern design.” NBTS, however, graduated one woman in Chemistry, Dyeing and Finishing. Each school also offered night courses for factory workers. These programs graduated far more students than the day schools: over 400 between the two schools. The programs of study, leading to a certificate, varied from one to two years. And finally, both day and evening classes were tuition free for Massachusetts residents.

New Bedford Textile School graduates from the Day Program, 1922.
Bradford Durfee Textile School graduates from the Day Program, 1922.

Graduation/Commencement programs for all years at both schools, plus all of their descendant schools, including Southeastern Massachusetts Technological Institute, Southeastern Massachusetts University, and the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, are available online in our digital archives, at https://umassd.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/collectionDiscovery?vid=01MA_DM_INST:umassd_library&collectionId=81121760040001301

Yearbooks and the annual catalog are online at the Internet Archive at www.archive.org

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AZORES – USA:  A JOURNEY INTO THE FUTURE”

The Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives is currently hosting the traveling exhibit “Azores – USA: A Journey into the Future,” which will remain open through March 31st

The eight-panel exhibit offers a synthesis of the history of the connections between the Azores and the United States of America.  The first panel sets the stage in 1750 and then takes the viewer on a journey of historical discovery to the present day.  There is a complementary exhibit in the William O. and Mary Jane MacLean Gallery within the Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese American Archives on Portuguese American Immigration.  This exhibit was recently featured at the Massachusetts State House. 

The Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives is open to the public Monday through Friday, 9:30 AM to 5 PM.  Guests should use Parking Lot 13.  For further information, contact 508-999-8686 or email jfarrar@umassd.edu

Exhibition title panel.
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UMass Dartmouth Alumni Bulletins in the Digital Archives

Did you know Alumni Bulletins from 1969 to 1974 are available to view online in the Digital Archives?

These bulletins include interesting gems from when UMass Dartmouth was the Southeastern Massachusetts Technological Institute and Southeastern Massachusetts University. Class notes, campus news, sports updates, alumni events, employment opportunities, photos, and more can be found within their pages.

In November 1969, construction of the library started and was big news: “The new structure, the focal point of the inner campus, will hold 400,000 books, seat 1,800 students, and provide space for a map room, rare book and special collection rooms, audio-visual carrels, a computer laboratory, two fully-equipped television studios, TV control room and a 235-foot communications tower.”

In February of 1971, updates included the donation of a color computer: “The computer will be utilized by the students in the advanced dyeing course to enable them to compute rapidly the types of dyes used in producing a given shade, and also the concentrations of each particular dye used to arrive at an exact color match… With the use of the computer, dyeing becomes nearly an exact science and real, accurate dye formulations are accurately produced.”

In May of 1973, an alumni event resulted in an elaborate description in the bulletin: “Scores of alumni lived it up at a swinging time at the annual Alumni Award Dinner-Dance and bacchanalia that fermented on Friday May 25th in the SMU Campus Center. They greeted old buddies, toasted each other with a few schnapps, returned time and again to the heavily laden festive buffet, and floated around the dance floor in a dazzling display of terpsichorean virtuosity. The description, of course, is an outrageous exaggeration. Actually, it was a reasonably respectable affair and nobody called the local gendarmes. Everyone simply had a jolly good time. So why don’t you come next year!”

The Alumni Bulletins are chock-full of tidbits of this institution’s history. You can see the early costs for living in the first dormitory on campus, an announcement for a production of Fiddler on the Roof, and the details for an alumni-sponsored trip to Copenhagen. This 8-day trip included accommodations, breakfast every morning, bus tours, tickets to the Royal Danish Ballet, and more. The cost in 1970? An extraordinarily-low $262.90.

You can check out the alumni bulletins here.

Nicole O’Connell, Graduate Student in Professional Writing and Communication

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UMass Dartmouth’s Rainbow Flag

Campus at sunset

For Pride Month, I looked into the origin of the rainbow flag flown at the entrance to the university. UMass Dartmouth’s flag was raised 27 years ago, on January 16, 1992 in recognition of the university’s commitment to cultural diversity. It is a 6-striped rainbow flag, including red, yellow, orange, green, blue and violet stripes. The rainbow flag was first introduced in 1978 for the gay community in San Francisco by artist Gilbert Baker and has become a symbol of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender pride. The original design had 8 stripes – pink, red, orange, yellow, green, light blue, or cyan, indigo and violet. Variations in the number and arrangement of the stripes abound with various meanings. According to some sources, the 6-striped version, popular since 1979, was easier to mass produce, and is therefore more common. Included here is a copy of the memo from John Bush, Head of Affirmative Action and Cultural Diversity at UMass Dartmouth, to Interim Chancellor Joseph Deck in 1992 relaying the background on the selection of the flag. Bush then repeated use of the colors of the flag in a 1992 publication from the Office of Affirmative Action and Cultural Diversity, now the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion entitled “Where We Stand.” Interim Chancellor Helm, in 2016 included the rainbow flag in the university’s official flag policy, noting that it would fly continuously year-round.

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Event: “The Carnation Revolution in the Feminine” on April 24

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A History Intern at Work

A familiar site in the Archives and Special Collections this semester has been the presence of Bryce King, a UMass Dartmouth senior history major completing his “Learning Through Engagement” 5B requirement in history by interning with Sonia Pacheco in the Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives.  Bryce spent 130 hours working in the archives, processing the papers of Portuguese-American author Julian Silva of San Francisco, and getting a start on the personal and professional papers of anthropologist Dr. Stephen Cabral, both collections received recently by the archives.

Julian Silva, a fourth-generation Portuguese-American, published several works of fiction, including his first novel, The gunnysack castle, which was republished by Tagus Press in 2007.  Dr. Stephen Cabral is an anthropologist who has taught at UMass Dartmouth, Bristol Community College, Bridgewater State University and Roger Williams University.  He is known for his photography, and knowledge of Portuguese feasting customs in the Azores, Madeira Islands, and New England.

To process the papers, Bryce went through each folder, replacing them with acid free versions, and noting the contents and dates of the materials.  When the Silva papers were complete, he started on the papers of Dr. Stephen Cabral.  When asked what was most interesting in the two collections, he noted one of his favorite courses taken at UMass Dartmouth was actually a summer course on the social history and culture of New Bedford, taught by none other than Stephen Cabral!

Bryce plans to ultimately be a history teacher. By the time he graduates in December of 2018 he will have completed the 4 plus MAT program and be ready to work.  He already knows the value of primary sources in k-12 education, but this internship has given him a close-up view of how archives are collected and processed for access.  We thank him for all of his hard work!

Judy Farrar, Archives and Special Collections Librarian
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Council of Women’s Organizations Archives Project Completed

In October of 2017 I began a one-semester internship at the Claire T. Carney Archives and Special Collections at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. As a first semester graduate student of Simmons College of Library and Information Science, pursuing a MLIS with a concentration in Archives Management, I was intrigued and excited about this new career field. I was responsible for processing and creating a digital finding aid in ArchivesSpace for the records of the Council of Women’s Organizations of Greater New Bedford.
Founded by Viola C. Manseau during the Great Depression, the Council was created as an opportunity for multiple area women’s organizations to collaborate by spearheading needed community service projects. To facilitate this goal, a board was established of delegates representing member organizations meeting annually to evaluate, select, and coordinate community service projects. Community service projects included a postcard fundraising effort to benefit The Joshua Project, an effort to raise awareness of child abuse after the murder of local toddler, Joshua Santos.  The postcard featured a portrait of Eloise Pina, a valued community member and longtime board member of the Council.
Though I had limited knowledge, the professional and student staff were supportive in guiding me to utilize traditional archival processing and metadata standards. Their expertise, combined with concurrent coursework, provided me with the practical experience needed to evaluate personal interest, best practices, and confirmation of the value of archives as an institution and profession.
-Racine Amos,Graduate Student, Simmons School of Library and Information Science

For the online finding for the collection, see https://archivesspace.lib.umassd.edu/repositories/3/resources/250

The Claire T. Carney Library Archives and Special Collections serves as the permanent repository for records of the various women’s groups that are and have been members of the Council of Women’s Organizations of Greater New Bedford.  To date, in addition to this collection, we have the records of the local chapters of the American Business Women’s Association, the Catholic Woman’s Club, the Polish Women’s Business and Professional Club, Church Women United, the New Bedford Garden Club, and the Polish and American World War Veterans Auxiliary Association. In the Archives of the Center for Jewish Culture we have the records of the Hebrew Ladies Helping Hand Society, National Council of Jewish Women, the Jewish War Veterans of the United State Ladies’ Auxiliary, the Jewish Professional Women’s Club, Hadassah, and the Sisterhoods of Tifereth Israel, Temple Beth El, and Ahavath Achim. 

– Judy Farrar, University Archivist

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Simmons Archival Intern David Boerman Creates Online Finding Aids

As a graduate student from Simmons College in the archival track of the Library and Information Sciences program, I completed a semester long internship at the Claire T. Carney Library Archives and Special Collections at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. The focus of my internship was creating more functional and searchable digital records for 28 university collections through the archives management system ArchivesSpace. Most of these collections were university records that document how faculty, staff and students contributed to the history of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and connected universities such as the Swain School of Design. However, a few manuscript collections, namely the Robert F. Kennedy Assassination Archives Records, were also processed as digital records during the semester.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These digital records make it easier for university archivists to search for collections, series, box locations and container types and identify similarities between collections through the proper metadata. Knowing the exact size of a specific box is significant for storage. Some types of boxes such as flat boxes, which are horizontal and often contain oversized materials like maps, calendars and posters, come in many different widths, heights and depths. The addition of unique barcodes to the physical containers and map drawers will also facilitate findability and organization of these materials. In the future, the archivist might even know what materials are in use and what materials are in storage.

Digital efforts and projects by the Claire T. Carney Library Archives and Special Collections are not new to the institution as seen by the digital archives and the digital objects like early twentieth century Swain School catalogs found on the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org). As well, there are digital scans of the paper finding aids on the archives website (http://www.lib.umassd.edu/archives/). While these finding aids are useful, they do not take full advantage of their digital nature. On the other hand, the finding aids created by ArchivesSpace contain a hyperlinked table of contents that allow users to find information quicker. For instance, with the Swain School of Design records, you might be interested in the merger records that combined that school with Southeastern Massachusetts University. With the previous finding aids, you would either have to scan a thirty-two page document, know what you are looking for or search by keywords. Additionally, the structure of creating the digital records helps remove the idiosyncratic nature of finding aids created at different times by different individuals through the creation of a uniform framework that requires certain elements in certain places. In addition, the digital objects listed above can be linked to directly within the finding aid. Like most aspects of this project, this linkage allows the archive to be more streamlined, centralized and organized in presenting its collections to its users.

David Boerman, Simmons College School of Library and Information Science

Archivists’ Note:  The project to implement ArchivesSpace began with UMass Dartmouth graduate student Jay Patel in 2016.  Of over 300 finding aids, 108 have been entered in the ArchivesSpace database.  In June there will be a public interface released, which we hope to offer to patrons sometime soon after.  Data entry continues with one of our current student assistants, Karen Stubblefield.Built for archives by archivists, ArchivesSpace is the open source archives information management application for managing and providing web access to archives, manuscripts and digital objects.

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When Colleges Went on Strike in 1970

The anti-war movement gained momentum in 1970 after four unarmed college students were killed by the National Guard in a protest at Kent State University in Ohio.  Students were protesting America’s invasion of Cambodia and President Nixon’s escalation of the  Vietnam War.  These events galvanized students at college campuses across the country to go on strike.  Students and faculty at Southeastern Massachusetts University, now UMass Dartmouth, were galvanized as well; 1,500 gathered on campus on Wednesday, May 6, 1970 to protest the war.  At the time, total enrollment was only 3,000, so this was almost half of the student body.  They followed this up with 500 participants marching down Route 6 to New Bedford City Hall, where they deposited one of four cardboard coffins that had been carried the entire route.  At the end of the on-campus rally,  Torch editor Bob Harp, read a national editorial calling for a nationwide university strike. Days later, on May 9, SMU students participated in a rally and march on Washington, D.C.  SMU’s involvement was organized by the SMU Peace Action Committee and Regional Strike Committee.

Issues of the student newspaper, the Torch, are preserved in the Archives and Special Collections, along with  flyers that were distributed on campus.   For more information on the campus in the 1960s and the 1970s, contact the Claire T. Carney Library Archives and Special Collections at jfarrar@umassd.edu.

 

– Judy Farrar, Head, Claire T. Carney Library Archives and Special Collections, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

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The Torch and Student Protests of 1969

In light of the Million Women March on January 21st and the many other protests happening before, after and during the inauguration of President Trump, I wondered if UMass Dartmouth students had historically been involved in protests in Washington, DC.  Searching the UMass Dartmouth Publications index to the Torch Archives, I came up with a long list of possible protests to look into.  A notable one, because it took place at an inauguration, was the 1969 protest at the first inauguration of President Richard M. Nixon.  January 1969 was preceded by one of the most turbulent years in U.S. history with the deaths of Robert F. Kennedy and Rev. Martin Luther King.  The U.S. was still heavily involved in the Vietnam War and public opinion against it reached a boiling point in 1968.  The Tet Offensive in February of 1968 turned public opinion rapidly into opposition to the war in reaction to high daily casualty reports among the American troops.  And finally, in a contentious election that year, Nixon won by an electoral landslide, while only receiving 43 percent of the popular vote.

January 20, 1969.  On the grounds of the Washington Monument, protesters held a “counter-inauguration” complete with a counter-inaugural ball under a tent, at which Judy Collins performed, and a reverse inaugural parade.  6,000 protesters participated, including some SMTI (UMD) students.  The number seems small compared to today, but keep in mind only 65,000 attended the inauguration to begin with, made clear by the photo in this Torch article by editor Al Caron.  At that time, UMass Dartmouth was known as SMTI (Southeastern Massachusetts Technological Institute).  SMTI students were simultaneously in an uproar over the firing of professor Krueger, one of many acts which led to the resignation of SMTI president Joseph Driscoll in 1971.  Also in February 1969, was the Winter Carnival, which culminated in the crowning of a Winter Carnival Queen, Louise Wojclk.  This issue of the Torch is a contrast in subject matter, but it’s clear that civil unrest is on their minds more than anything else.  So much so that in the 1969 yearbook, published at the end of the Spring semester, a full-page spread was devoted to “Campus Unrest.”

For access to the Torch index, please follow the link on the Claire T. Carney Library Archives and Special Collections web page at  http://umdserials.lib.umassd.edu/

Form more information on the turbulent year of 1968, see http://www.ushistory.org/us/56f.asp

Our long-range digitization plans include digitizing the entire run of the SMTI, SMU and UMass Dartmouth Torch, as funding permits.

 

 

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