The following collections are available for use in the Archives & Special Collections Reading Room, which is open Monday-Friday from 10-4, and closed on major holidays. The links for each collection lead to their corresponding finding aids. A finding aid is the archival equivalent to a library catalog entry. For more information on finding aids, please refer to this guide.
- Student Activism at Brandeis University
- Files in this collection were created from 1951 to the present. Materials include newspaper clippings, photographs, correspondence, videotape and handwritten notes. Subjects covered by the files include civil rights, the Vietnam War, apartheid in South Africa, and others, and provide rich information on the history of student activism at Brandeis
- Hall-Hoag collection of extremist literature in the United States
- The approximately 5,000 publications, represent an effort to document the wide spectrum of political and religious dissent from the post-World War II period through the Reagan Era. The collection contains pamphlets, political tracts, and other materials on topics including the Vietnam War, the spread of Communism, the nuclear arms race, and race relations.
- Radical Pamphlet collection
- The collection contains pamphlets, magazines, campaign fliers, books, posters, and political tracts. Topics include labor politics, race relations, civil liberties, the Great Depression, World War II, and life in Central and Eastern Europe under communism. The collection shows the trajectory of American radicalism during the Twentieth Century, from its height during the Popular Front of the 1930s to its relative decline during the McCarthy era, to its rejuvenation with the movements of the New Left during the late 1950s and 1960s. As a whole, the collection provides invaluable insights into the intellectual, political, and social worlds of twentieth century American radicalism.
- Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence
- From 1965-1973, the Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence at Brandeis University collected data and conducted research dealing with social violence, particularly race riots, in America. It was founded in the wake of a series of conferences held at Brandeis concerned with the place of violence in the United States in the wake of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The Center’s director led researchers in large-scale projects treating urban violence that encompassed interviews, surveys, and analysis of media reports from cities across the country, with the principal goal of finding a model for such violence. The Lemberg Center included a Riot Data Clearinghouse, which supplied regular information for its Riot Data Review publication.
- Gordon Fellman papers
- The files in this collection were created from 1949 to 2006. They include correspondence, memos, posters, and fliers; local, student, and national newspaper coverage; manuscript notes; and videos. There is considerable primary documentation of the events and dialogue between the participants of the 1960s and 1970s student protest movements at Brandeis and across the nation. A substantial amount of secondary material reflects the wider view of the social and political turmoil surrounding the Vietnam War. A later section documents the student and faculty attempts to force the University to divest its endowment of stock in companies that were active in South Africa during the 1980s.
