The newest title in our Campus Guide series takes readers on an architectural tour of University of Massachusetts Amherst. As one of the nation's oldest public universities, and the largest in the Northeast, the University has a rich and storied history. Initially chartered as the Massachusetts Agricultural College, the school has grown from fifty farmers to close to 24,000 students of diverse backgrounds and academic interests. The University's campus has also expectedly experienced parallel growth. From a few barns on the Berkshire foothills, the University now sits atop nearly 1,500 acres. Five carefully considered tours put the architectural history of the campus into context.

In 1863, just a year after Congress enacted the Land-Grant Colleges Act, Massachusetts Agricultural College embarked on its mission to offer instruction to the state's citizens in the agricultural, mechanical, and military arts. The school boasted a faculty of 4 and a student body of 56. As UMass Amherst celebrates its sesquicentennial in 2013, its full-time faculty numbers nearly 1,200 and the combined undergraduate/graduate student population is close to 28,000. The principles that undergirded Mass Aggie's founding continue to form the basis for UMass Amherst's mission of preparing young people to make their way in life by stretching boundaries in all disciplines, from the physical and social sciences to the liberal arts. UMass Rising looks at the school over the course of its first 150 years and mines that history to reveal not only how these principles have been fostered, but also the whys and whos. The engaging text is enhanced by features on all aspects of life at this unique university. The reader encounters a cavalcade of notable people, as well as many little-known anecdotes, from the humorous to the touching. All are anchored by a gathering of contemporary and archival images, some published here for the first time. Distributed for the University of Massachusetts Amherst by University of Massachusetts Press.

The forgotten history of American terrorists who, in the name of God, conspired to overthrow the government and formed an alliance with Hitler. On January 13, 1940, FBI agents burst into the homes and offices of seventeen members of the Christian Front, seizing guns, ammunition, and homemade bombs. J. Edgar HooverÕs charges were incendiary: the group, he alleged, was planning to incite a revolution and install a Òtemporary dictatorshipÓ in order to stamp out Jewish and communist influence in the United States. Interviewed in his jail cell, the frontÕs ringleader was unbowed: ÒAll I can say isÑlong live Christ the King! Down with communism!Ó In Nazis of Copley Square, Charles Gallagher provides a crucial missing chapter in the history of the American far right. The men of the Christian Front imagined themselves as crusaders fighting for the spiritual purification of the nation, under assault from godless communism, and they were hardly alone in their beliefs. The front traced its origins to vibrant global Catholic theological movements of the early twentieth century, such as the Mystical Body of Christ and Catholic Action. The frontÕs anti-Semitism was inspired by Sunday sermons and by lay leaders openly espousing fascist and Nazi beliefs. Gallagher chronicles the evolution of the front, the transatlantic cloak-and-dagger intelligence operations that subverted it, and the mainstream political and religious leaders who shielded the frontÕs activities from scrutiny. Nazis of Copley Square offers a grim tale of faith perverted to violent ends, and its lessons provide a warning for those who hope to stop the spread of far-right violence today.

Get an education in ghostly history—and meet the spirits that haunt schools in Boston and beyond. Includes photos! Among the throngs of students attending colleges and universities across the state of Massachusetts linger the apparitions of those who met their untimely ends on campus grounds. In 1953, Eugene O’Neill, an Irish American playwright, died in room 401 of the Sheraton Hotel—today a Boston University dormitory. Named Writer’s Corridor in O’Neill’s honor, the fourth floor draws students in search of creative inspiration and a sighting of the ghostly writer. A grief-stricken widow roams the halls of Winthrop Hall at Endicott College in her pink wedding gown. She threw herself from her widow’s walk after receiving news of her husband's death at sea, and is known to students today as the “pink lady.” Author Renee Mallett reveals the stories behind these “school spirits”—and offers eerie stories from over two dozen colleges and universities throughout the Bay State.

A searching account of nineteenth-century salvage anthropology, an effort to preserve the culture of ÒvanishingÓ Indigenous peoples through dispossession of the very communities it was meant to protect. In the late nineteenth century, anthropologists, linguists, archaeologists, and other chroniclers began amassing Indigenous cultural objectsÑcrafts, clothing, images, song recordingsÑby the millions. Convinced that Indigenous peoples were doomed to disappear, collectors donated these objects to museums and universities that would preserve and exhibit them. Samuel Redman dives into the archive to understand what the collectors deemed the tradition of the Òvanishing IndianÓ and what we can learn from the complex legacy of salvage anthropology. The salvage catalog betrays a vision of Native cultures clouded by racist assumptionsÑa vision that had lasting consequences. The collecting practice became an engine of the American museum and significantly shaped public education and preservation, as well as popular ideas about Indigenous cultures. Prophets and Ghosts teases out the moral challenges inherent in the salvage project. Preservationists successfully maintained an important human inheritance, sometimes through collaboration with Indigenous people, but collectorsÕ methods also included outright theft. The resulting portrait of Indigenous culture reinforced the publicÕs confidence in the hierarchies of superiority and inferiority invented by ÒscientificÓ racism. Today the same salvaged objects are sources of invaluable knowledge for researchers and museum visitors. But the question of what should be done with such collections is nonetheless urgent. Redman interviews Indigenous artists and curators, who offer fresh perspectives on the history and impact of cultural salvage, pointing to new ideas on how we might contend with a challenging inheritance.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst, situated one hundred miles west of Boston, began as a modest land-grant institution with four buildings and has since grown to a sprawling campus with three hundred fifty buildings and twenty-four thousand students. Founded in 1863 to serve students in the fields of agriculture and science, the university has survived in the shadow of some of the most prestigious institutions of higher education in America. Irreplaceable images from the Special Collections and Archives department of the W. E. B. Du Bois Library include the many famous people in business, entertainment, professional sports, journalism, science, and politics who proudly refer to themselves as alumni of the place known as UMass Amherst.