Volume from Healey Library’s Special Collections featured in Rose Art Museum exhibition

War Against War

Ernst Friedrich’s War Against War (1924), from University Archives & Special Collections in the Joseph P. Healey Library at UMass Boston

University Archives & Special Collections in the Joseph P. Healey Library at UMass Boston recently had the opportunity to broaden exposure to our collections by loaning our copy of Ernst Friedrich’s War Against War (1924) to the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis Museum, as a centerpiece for their current exhibition, 1914: Magnus Plessen. Organized by Rose Art Museum curator-at-large Katy Siegel, 1914:Magnus Plessen incorporates recent work by Berlin-based painter Magnus Plessen (b.1967) alongside the historical materials and documents of World War I that inspired this body of work.

Curator Katy Siegel notes that in 1924, Ernst Friedrich published War Against War, a book of photographs that documented the experience of World War I. In Friedrich’s visual narrative, early German patriotic fervor gives way quickly to terrible consequences, including the injuries that trench warfare inflicted on individual soldiers. The images themselves were controversial, shocking in their force and frankness.

About 75 years after the initial publication of War Against War, contemporary Berlin artist Magnus Plessen obtained a copy. He has been looking at the book for the past decade, turning over in his mind the images of grievously wounded— now dead—soldiers he cannot forget. In 2012, he was impelled to begin paintings and drawings, working with those images. Unlike the original photographs, the subject of these art works is not the literal, graphic depiction of wounds, but the figurative hole in the original self or self-image of the soldier. Velvety black areas mark these blind spots. A dozen of Plessen’s paintings and accompanying drawings are exhibited, alongside selections from Dix’s print series, copies of Friedrich’s book, and a variety of archival and documentary materials.

1914: Magnus Plessen runs from September 10 through December 14, 2014, at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University.


University Archives & Special Collections in the Joseph P. Healey Library at UMass Boston collects materials related to the university’s history, as well as materials that reflect the institution’s urban mission and strong support of community service, notably in collections of records of urban planning, social welfare, social action, alternative movements, community organizations, and local history related to neighboring communities.

University Archives & Special Collections welcomes inquiries from individuals, organizations, and businesses interested in donating materials of an archival nature that that fit within our collecting policy. These include manuscripts, documents, organizational archives, collections of photographs, unique publications, and audio and video media. For more information about donating to University Archives & Special Collections, click here or email library.archives@umb.edu.

Mass. Memories Road Show heads to Allston-Brighton

Allston-Brighton Mass. Memories Road ShowWhen: Sunday, October 26, 2014 – 10:30 a.m – 2:30 p.m.

Location: Veronica B. Smith Multi-Service Senior Center, 20 Chestnut Hill Avenue, Brighton, Mass. Click here for directions.

Do you have a connection to the neighborhoods of Allston and Brighton in Boston, Massachusetts? Share your memories and take your place in Massachusetts history at this free, public event.

Please bring up to three photographs related to your experience of Allston and Brighton. The photos will be scanned and immediately returned to you at the event. All images and stories collected at Mass. Memories Road Shows are available online at openarchives.umb.edu.

The Mass. Memories Road Show is a statewide digital history project that documents people, places, and events in Massachusetts history through family photographs and stories.

The Mass. Memories Road Show is produced by the Joseph P. Healey Library at UMass Boston and is co-sponsored by the Patricia C. Flaherty ’81 Endowed Fund.

The Allston-Brighton Mass. Memories Road Show is being hosted by the Veronica B. Smith Multi-Service Senior Center and the City of Boston Elderly Commission (Emily F. Shea, Commissioner; Martin J. Walsh, Mayor). The event is sponsored locally by Allston-Brighton Community Development Corporation; Allston Village Main Streets; Boston Public Library, Faneuil Branch; Brighton-Allston Historical Society; and Brighton Main Streets.

Questions? Email carolyn.goldstein@umb.edu.

Thursday, Oct. 30 – I Can See For Miles: The Past, Present, and Future of the Nantucket Field Station

Nantucket Field StationWhen: Thursday, October 30, 2014 | Noon – 2:00 pm

Where: Campus Center, 3rd floor Ballroom, section C (3550C), University of Massachusetts Boston

Light lunch and refreshments will be provided.

The Nantucket Field Station was donated to the University of Massachusetts in 1963 and became a part of the teaching and research activities of UMass Boston when the university first opened its doors in 1965. At this event, part of celebrations around UMass Boston’s 50th anniversary, speakers will discuss the early history of the Field Station, as well as current and future teaching and research activities on the island.

Nantucket Field StationSpeakers include:

  • Richard Gelpke, Professor of Geographic Science (retired), UMass Boston
  • Sarah Oktay, Director of the Nantucket Field Station, UMass Boston
  • Special guest lightning-round panelists, each charged with briefly describing their work with the Field Station, include Ginger Andrews, who has a family connection to the Nantucket Field Station; Robyn Hannigan, Dean of the School for the Environment; Jim Lentowski, Executive Director of the Nantucket Conservation FoundationConevery Valencius, Associate Professor of HistoryJack Wiggin, Director of the Urban Harbors Institute; and Roberta Wollons, Chair and Professor of History.

Light lunch and refreshments will be provided.

Free and open to the public. RSVP to library.archives@umb.edu.

Learn more about this event here.

Co-sponsored by the School for the Environment, the Nantucket Field Station, the Urban Harbors Institute, and the Friends of the Joseph P. Healey Library at UMass Boston.

For disability-related accommodations, including dietary accommodations, please visit www.ada.umb.edu two weeks prior to the event.

Book Reading and Reception: A People’s History of the New Boston

People's History of the New BostonWhen: Thursday, October 16, 2014 | 3:00 – 5:00 pm

Where: Point Lounge, Campus Center 3rd Floor, on the campus side, University of Massachusetts Boston

Join the Friends of the Joseph P. Healey Library for a reading from and reception for Jim Vrabel’s new book, A People’s History of the New Boston, published by UMass Press. Barbara Lewis, director of the William Monroe Trotter Institute, will introduce the author.

Books will be available for purchase, and refreshments will be served.

Although Boston today is a vibrant and thriving city, it was anything but that in the years following World War II. By 1950 it had lost a quarter of its tax base over the previous twenty-five years, and during the 1950s it would lose residents faster than any other major city in the country.

Credit for the city’s turnaround since that time is often given to a select group of people, all of them men, all of them white, and most of them well off. In fact, a large group of community activists, many of them women, people of color, and not very well off, were also responsible for creating the Boston so many enjoy today. This book provides a grassroots perspective on the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s, when residents of the city’s neighborhoods engaged in an era of activism and protest unprecedented in Boston since the American Revolution.

Using interviews with many of those activists, contemporary news accounts, and historical sources, Jim Vrabel describes the demonstrations, sit-ins, picket lines, boycotts, and contentious negotiations through which residents exerted their influence on the city that was being rebuilt around them. He includes case histories of the fights against urban renewal, highway construction, and airport expansion; for civil rights, school desegregation, and welfare reform; and over Vietnam and busing. He also profiles a diverse group of activists from all over the city, including Ruth Batson, Anna DeFronzo, Moe Gillen, Mel King, Henry Lee, and Paula Oyola. Vrabel tallies the wins and losses of these neighborhood Davids as they took on the Goliaths of the time, including Boston’s mayors. He shows how much of the legacy of that activism remains in Boston today.

Jim Vrabel is a longtime Boston community activist and historian. He is author of When in Boston: A Time Line & Almanac and Homage to Henry: A Dramatization of John Berryman’s “The Dream Songs.

For disability-related accommodations, including dietary accommodations, please visit www.ada.umb.edu two weeks prior to the event.

UMass Boston Archives staff give presentation at Society of American Archivists annual meeting

Joanne Riley, University Archivist and Curator of Special Collections in the Healey Library at UMass Boston (left) and an SAA conference attendee discuss the department's poster.

Joanne Riley, University Archivist and Curator of Special Collections in the Healey Library at UMass Boston (left), and SAA conference attendee discuss the department’s poster.

Last week, archivists from University Archives & Special Collections in the Joseph P. Healey Library at UMass Boston headed to Washington, D.C., for the joint annual meeting of the Council of State Archivists (CoSA), the National Association of Government Archives and Records Administrators (NAGARA), and the Society of American Archivists (SAA). On Thursday and Friday of this year’s conference, called ARCHIVES*RECORDS: Ensuring Access, Andrew Elder, Jessica Holden, and Joanne Riley presented as part of the professional poster session on our efforts to establish successful ongoing relationships with community archives and organizations.

SAA PosterOur poster, titled “University Archives and Community Organizations: Ensuring Access through Collaboration,” looks closely at our ongoing relationship with The Irish Ancestral Research Association (TIARA) and our collaborative efforts to preserve and provide access to 79,000 mortuary records from the Massachusetts Catholic Order of Foresters. Elements of the collaboration included shifting stewardship of the records from the Foresters to TIARA to UMass Boston, integrating TIARA’s efforts in processing and indexing the records into the Archives’ workflow, providing in-person and electronic access to the records, and hosting public events that celebrate the partnership and educate the public about the records. This poster illustrates the lessons learned during the records’ journey from an active business to a community organization to an archives and special collections department at a large, public research university.

View the poster and handout here.


University Archives & Special Collections in the Joseph P. Healey Library at UMass Boston collects materials related to the university’s history, as well as materials that reflect the institution’s urban mission and strong support of community service, notably in collections of records of urban planning, social welfare, social action, alternative movements, community organizations, and local history related to neighboring communities.

University Archives & Special Collections welcomes inquiries from individuals, organizations, and businesses interested in donating materials of an archival nature that that fit within our collecting policy. These include manuscripts, documents, organizational archives, collections of photographs, unique publications, and audio and video media. For more information about donating to University Archives & Special Collections, click here or email library.archives@umb.edu.