DC Public Library Radio

On this two-part episode from our "Notes from the Library" series, we’ll talk about movies and theatres with the Washington Psychotronic Film Society, and old Washington, D.C., movie theatres with local historians Pat Padua and robert Headley!

On this special episode of "All Things Local" we talk to the DC Oral History Collaborative, one of the DC Public Library’s partners. The collaborative has the important goal of preserving the unrecorded oral histories of Washington, D.C. and ensuring that generations have access to this history. We talk to them today about their methods, why it’s important to collect oral histories, and how others can help with this work.

On this month's episode of All Things Local guest Lamont Carey discusses his life growing up in Washington, being incarcerated as a juvenile and re-entering society as an adult. We also discuss his lifes work.

Today on DCPL Radio, we compare and contrast three very different documentarians -- The Maysles brothers, Nick Broomfield and Ken Burns. Casey Danielson is joined by his DCPL Studio Lab colleagues who are also documentary filmmakers.

Gabi of DC Public Library and Madhvi discuss the WOC Book Club DC and books that they've read so far including: The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar, Human Acts by Han Kang, Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui, So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo and Re Jane by Patricia Park. Get Lit is DC Public Library's, "all library things and staff" series.

Guest Anthony T. Browder joins host Olubunmi Bakare to discuss his life and work.Anthony is an author, publisher, cultural historian, artist and educational consultant. He's the founder and director of IKG Cultural Resources and has devoted 35 years researching ancient Egyptian history, science, philosophy and culture.

DCPL Presents Andrew White, Northeast, Washington, DC, multi-instrumentalist and "self-producer." A conversation about his origins, life as a musician and businessman, and we're listening to "Shaft Blues" and "Superfly Blues" from his 1974 record "Passion Flower"

Juan Pablo Guzman: Originally from Guatemala and now living in the US, Pablo has lived among the indigenous Ixil people and is in production on a documentary series about the Guatemalan genocide of the Ixil people in the early 1980s, focusing on the brave resistance of the people in the face of a mighty American-backed military force.

On this week's episode of DCPL Radio, hosts William Reid and Victor Benitez are joined by Jeremy Gardner, an archivist for the Smithsonian and a volunteer archivist at the DC Punk Archive. We'll be discussing why punk history matters, what's in the Punk Archive and how technology is changing the way libraries and archives work. Also joining us is Thaddeus Coates who recently self-published a book using library equipment.

On this week's episode of DCPL's "All Things Local", host Olubunmi Bakare is joined by Dianne Dale, author of "The Village That SHaped Us". According to Dr. Thomas Battle, director emeritus of the Moorland-Spingarn Center at Howard University, The Village That Shaped Us sets the standard for how to look at a community. Using oral history interviews in the way of Anna Deavere Smith and Studs Terkel to tell the story of a Freedmen's Village settled in 1867 on a hill overlooking the nation's capital in SE Washington, DC, the reader is taken on a journey into a community sold to blacks by the Freedmen's Bureau after the Civil War. Sale of the land and life in the community led to such events as the establishment of Howard University, the Tuskegee Airmen program at Tuskegee Institute (now University), and Brown v. Board of Education. In a series of oral history interviews copiously illustrated with over 300 pictures and documents, the book takes you on a journey through the history of a neighborhood; safe, industrious, self-sufficient, now gone through changes brought by or through the 1954 Supreme Court school desegregation ruling marking the beginning of changes that devastated the landscape of this quiet village--chopped to pieces by highways, byways, bridges, flight to the suburbs and urban renewal. It chronicles in plain language the inevitable decline of a community that mirrors the devastation wreaked in comparable communities across the country.