Enoch Pratt Free Library Podcast

For a century Harlem has been celebrated as the capital of black America, a thriving center of cultural achievement and political action. At a crucial moment in Harlem's history, as gentrification encroaches, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts untangles the myth and meaning of Harlem's legacy. Examining the epic Harlem of official history and the personal Harlem that begins at her front door, Rhodes-Pitts introduces us to a wide variety of characters, past and present. She compares her own experience of moving to Harlem with accounts from literature of the Harlem Renaissance.

A graduate of Harvard University, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts received the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award and was a Fulbright Scholar for 2006-07.

Recorded On: Wednesday, February 29, 2012

In Out of Left Field, Rebecca Alpert explores how Jewish sports entrepreneurs, political radicals, and a team of black Jews from Belleville, Virginia called the Belleville Grays -- the only Jewish team in the history of black baseball -- made their mark on the segregated world of the Negro Leagues.

Through in-depth research, Alpert tells the stories of the Jewish businessmen who owned and promoted teams as they both acted out and fell victim to pervasive stereotypes of Jews as greedy middlemen and hucksters. Some Jewish owners produced a kind of comedy baseball, similar to basketball's Harlem Globetrotters, that reaped financial benefits for both owners and players but also played upon the worst stereotypes of African Americans and prevented these black "showmen" from being taken seriously by the major leagues. Alpert also shows how Jewish entrepreneurs, motivated in part by the traditional Jewish commitment to social justice, helped grow the business of black baseball in the face of oppressive Jim Crow restrictions.

Rebecca Alpert is associate professor of religion and women's studies at Temple University. She is the author of Whose Torah? A Concise Guide to Progressive Judaism.

Recorded On: Tuesday, February 28, 2012

With Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), Phillis Wheatley became the first English-speaking person of African descent to publish a book and only the second woman -- of any race or background -- to do so in America. Written in Boston while she was just a teenager, and still a slave, Wheatley's work was an international sensation. In Phillis Wheatley, Vincent Carretta offers the first full-length biography of a figure whose origins and later life have remained shadowy despite her iconic status.

A scholar with extensive knowledge of transatlantic literature and history, Carretta uncovers new details about Wheatley's origins, her upbringing, and how she gained freedom. Assessing Wheatley's entire body of work, he discusses the likely role she played in the production, marketing, and distribution of her writing. She developed a remarkable network that transcended racial, class, political, religious, and geographical boundaries.

Vincent Carretta is a professor of English at the University of Maryland. His most recent books are Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man, winner of the Annibel Jenkins Prize, and The Life and Letters of Philip Quaque, the First African Anglican Missionary, coedited with Ty M. Reese.

Recorded On: Sunday, February 26, 2012

In Delirium, Nancy L. Cohen tells the story of a little-known shadow movement that has fueled America's political wars for 40 years. She traces our current political crisis back to the rise of a well-organized, ideologically driven opposition movement to turn back the sexual revolution, feminism, and gay rights. This sexual counterrevolution, Cohen shows, has played a leading role in shattering both political parties, dividing Americans into irreconcilable warring camps, and polarizing the nation.

Nancy L. Cohen is a historian, writer and contributor to The Huffington Post. She is the author of two books, including The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1914. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Business History Review, and elsewhere.

Recorded On: Tuesday, February 21, 2012

A family's recently discovered correspondence provides the inspiration for this fascinating and deeply moving account of Jewish family life before, during and after the Holocaust. Rebecca Boehling and Uta Larkey reveal how the Kaufmann-Steinberg family was pulled apart under the Nazi regime and dispersed over three continents. The family's unique eight-way correspondence across two generations brings into sharp focus the dilemma of Jews in Nazi Germany facing the painful decisions of when, if, and to where they should emigrate.

Boehling and Larkey capture the family members' fluctuating emotions of hope, optimism, resignation and despair, as well as the day-to-day concerns, experiences and dynamics of family life despite increasing persecution and impending deportation. Headed by two sisters who were among the first female business owners in Essen, the family was far from conventional, and their story contributes new dimensions to our understanding of Jewish life in Germany and in exile during these dark years.

Rebecca Boehling is professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Uta Larkey is associate professor of German at Goucher College.

Part of the Schapiro Lecture Series, sponsored by a generous bequest from Mrs. Gloria L. Schapiro.

Recorded On: Wednesday, February 22, 2012

The first of two novels based on the slave revolt led by Nat Turner, Part One: The Witnesses is a fact-based epic that discredits the primary historical source document, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831), which served as the basis for William Styron's novel. Foster located the original handwritten trial transcripts in which Turner actually pled innocent and offered no confession. During five years of research, she interviewed descendants of those killed, Turner's family, friends and foes, and analyzed related trial transcripts. Sharon Ewell Foster is the author of seven novels, including Passing by Samaria. She describes her new novel as "Roots meets The Da Vinci Code.'''

Recorded On: Sunday, February 19, 2012

In a love letter to a vanished way of life, Robert Kanigel tells the story of the Great Blasket Island off the west coast of Ireland, notable during the early 20th century for the vivid communal life of its residents and the unadulterated Irish they spoke. With the Irish language rapidly vanishing throughout the rest of Ireland, the Great Blasket became a magnet for scholars and writers, linguists and playwrights, drawn there during the Gaelic renaissance to study and to learn. As we follow these visitors, we become immersed both in the fascinating culture of the 150 or so islanders who, tucked away from the rest of civilization, kept alive an entire country's past, and in the newcomers and island dwellers alike who would bring the island's remarkable story to the larger world.

Robert Kanigel is an award-winning writer and teacher. He is the author of six previous books, including The Man Who Knew Infinity, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Most recently he taught at MIT, where he directed the graduate program in science writing.

Recorded On: Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Ron and his girlfriend Jill bought an old condemned fraternity house in Baltimore and gave it new life, despite the fact that neither of them knew anything about home renovation. Their realtor, friends and parents told them they were mad as March hares to attempt it. Ron and Jill's story of anguish, love, and the ultimate "American Dream" of home ownership offers inspiration, insight, and hilarity. In 2008, This Old House magazine published a feature story about their work, and it drew more than 40,000 readers to the magazine's website.

Ron Tanner teaches writing at Loyola University in Baltimore and directs the Marshall Islands Story Project (mistories.org). He is the author of two books: Kiss Me, Stranger and Bed of Nails, which won both the G.S. Sharat Chandra Award and the Towson Prize for Literature. He has won many other literary prizes as well, including a Faulkner Society gold medal, a Jack Dyer Fiction Prize, and a Pushcart Prize.

Recorded On: Saturday, February 11, 2012

Clarinda Harriss is a professor emerita of English at Towson University whose poems and short fiction are widely anthologized. Her most recent books are Air Travel, Mortmain, and Dirty Blue Voice. She recently coedited Hot Sonnets, a collection of modern erotic sonnets. She directs BrickHouse Books, Maryland's oldest literary press. Her ongoing research interest is in prison writers. CityLit Project established the Harriss Poetry Prize in her honor.

Read a poem by Clarinda Harriss.

Bruce Sager works as a corporate officer in a systems integration firm. His book Famous won the 2010 Harriss Poetry Prize. He has received Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Awards, a Baltimore City Arts Grant, and an Artscape Literary Arts Award. Prior books include Nine Ninety­-Five and The Pumping Station. Dick Allen, the Connecticut Poet Laureate, has described Sager's voice as "self-conscious, knowledgeable, confident, wacky, exuberant."

Read a poem by Bruce Sager.

Recorded On: Wednesday, February 8, 2012

When Fortune, a slave, died in 1798, his owner, Dr. Porter, dissected his body and preserved the skeleton. Fortune's bones remained in the doctor's family until they were given to the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, Connecticut in 1930.

In the 1950s, a young African American woman named Henrietta Lacks went to Johns Hopkins Hospital for cancer treatment. During her treatment, tissues were taken from her body without her knowledge and used to grow cells for research purposes. These cells, later nicknamed HeLa cells, were discovered to have extraordinary growth abilities and have been used in countless experiments since.

This panel discussion examines ethics in medical education, research, treatment, and practice and explore the parallels between Fortune's story and that of Henrietta Lacks.

Panelists include: Professor Taunya Lovell-Banks, University of Maryland School of Law; Dr. Curt Civin, University of Maryland School of Medicine; David Lacks, son of Henrietta Lacks; Ysaye Barnwell, composer and curator of the Fortune's Bones Project. Moderator: Kojo Nnamdi, WAMU-FM.

Presented in partnership with the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland, College Park. www.claricesmithcenter.umd.edu/fortune

Recorded On: Monday, February 6, 2012