Enoch Pratt Free Library Podcast

It's time for all of us to consider how we are individually and collectively hindering the achievement of young girls and women. Miss Representation shows how mainstream media outlets contribute to the under-representation of women in positions of power and influence in America. The film challenges the media's limited and often disparaging portrayals of women and girls, making it difficult for women to achieve leadership positions.

Miss Representation includes stories from teenage girls and provocative interviews with politicians, journalists, entertainers, activists and academics. It offers startling facts and statistics that will leave audiences shaken and armed with a new perspective.

Panelists include: Rhonda English, My Sister's Place; Lorna Hanley, Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women; Byron Hurt, award-winning filmmaker and anti-sexist activist; Molly McGrath Tierney, Baltimore City Dept. of Social Services; Paula Monopoli, University of Maryland School of Law, Women, Leadership, and Equality Program; Caprice Martin Smith, SharperMinds Consultants; Dr. Mary Washington, Maryland House of Delegates, 43rd District. Moderator: April Yvonne Garrett, Civic Frame.

Recorded On: Saturday, October 1, 2011

In July 1942, American prisoners of war were performing Julius Caesar on a makeshift stage in Burma at the same time that the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra played the Hippodrome Theatre on Eutaw Street. In June 1944, more than 3,000 U.S. Marines died capturing the Mariana Islands in the western Pacific Ocean while fans back in Baltimore were cheering the International League Orioles in their successful bid for a championship.

These are just two of the startling juxtapositions that Gilbert Sandler writes about in his account of life on the home front in Baltimore during World War II. Rarely seen photographs from the Baltimore Sun, the News-American, and the Afro-American bring to life the rich, personal anecdotes of wartime Baltimoreans and transport readers back to an indelible era of Baltimore history.

Born and raised in Baltimore, and a service member in the Navy during WWII, Gilbert Sandler is author of Jewish Baltimore: A Family Album and the award-winning Small Town Baltimore: An Album of Memories. Sandler hosts the popular "Baltimore Stories" series on WYPR-FM.

Recorded On: Tuesday, September 27, 2011

In The Lion of Judah in the New World, Ted Vestal relates how Emperor Haile Selassie helped shape America's image of Africa and how that image continues to evolve in the United States today. Haile Selassie was the first African head of state to be honored with a tickertape parade in New York City and the first to spend the night at the White House. What was it about this charismatic emperor that so captivated Americans and how did he become a symbol of all Africa?

Theodore Vestal is professor emeritus of political science at Oklahomas State University, the American university with the longest continual relationship with Ethiopia. He went to Ethiopia as a Peace Corps executive in 1964 and has maintained a scholarly interest in the country and its people ever since. Vestal is the author of International Education: Its History and Promise for Today; Ethiopia: A Post-Cold War African State; and The Eisenhower Court and Civil Liberties.

Recorded On: Monday, September 26, 2011

 A few years ago, journalist McKay Jenkins had surgery for a baseball-sized tumor in his abdomen. Before the operation, researchers asked him about his exposure to toxic chemicals like formaldehyde, weed killers, glues, dry cleaning fluids, and plastic meat wraps. He realized he had no idea what he was inadvertently absorbing every day and set out to find out.

In What's Gotten Into Us?, Jenkins looks at the dangers of the chemicals present in our daily lives, the way everyday things may be making us sick, and how we can protect ourselves by making wiser, healthier choices.

McKay Jenkins is the Tilgman Professor of English and Director of Journalism at the University of Delaware. His previous books include: The Last Ridge, The White Death, and Bloody Falls of the Coppermine.

Recorded On: Wednesday, September 21, 2011

In 1826, visionary leader John H. B. Latrobe founded the Maryland Institute for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts to help meet pressing skilled labor demands of the Industrial Revolution and to provide a cultural center featuring scientific and fine arts exhibitions and Lyceum lectures for Baltimore, the nation's fastest growing urban center at that time. Making History/Making Art: MICA chronicles the people, the events and the turning points in the evolution of this new experiment in education into a premiere college of art internationally and an invaluable community and cultural resource known today simply as MICA.

A graduate of Trinity College (CT), Doug Frost joined the senior administration of Maryland Institute College of Art in 1966 after obtaining an MA in HIstory from Yale. When he became Vice President for Development, Emeritus in 2006, he began researching and writing the College's history.

Presented in partnership with the Maryland Historical Society.

Recorded On: Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Dr. Michelle Gourdine, physician and author of Reclaiming Our Health: A Guide to African American Wellness, and Dr. Thomas LaVeist, director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Disparities Solutions, discuss the inequities that exist in our current medical care system and offer solutions for change.

Dr. Gourdine is a clinical assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and senior associate faculty at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Dr. LaVeist is the William C. and Nancy F. Richardson Professor in Health Policy and Director of the Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Recorded On: Tuesday, September 20, 2011

The 2011 Mencken Memorial Lecture,  "The Literary Journalist in the Era of H. L. Mencken: Vincent Starrett, Christopher Morley, and Clifton Fadiman," is presented by Michael Dirda, book columnist for the Washington Post.

Michael Dirda received the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. A graduate of Oberlin College, he received a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Cornell University. Dirda is the author of the memoir An Open Book and of four collections of essays: Readings, Bound to Please, Book by Book and Classics for Pleasure. His latest book, On Conan Doyle, will be published this fall by Princeton University Press.

Recorded On: Saturday, September 10, 2011

Barack Obama, father of the American president, was part of Africa's "independence generation." In 1959 it seemed his star would shine brightly: he came to the U.S. from Kenya on a university scholarship. In Hawaii, he met Ann Dunham and his son Barack was born. He left his young family to study for a Master's degree from Harvard.

Obama was a brilliant economist, yet never held the coveted government job he felt should have been his. He was a polygamist, an alcoholic, and an ardent African nationalist unafraid to tell truth to power at a time when that could get you killed. Father of eight, nurturer of none, he was an unlikely person to father the first African American president of the United States. Yet he was, like that son, a man moved by the dream of a better world. Through dozens of exclusive new interviews, prodigious research, and determined investigation, Sally Jacobs tells his story.

Sally Jacobs has been a reporter for more than three decades, most recently with The Boston Globe.

Recorded On: Monday, September 12, 2011

As part of the Mencken Society annual meeting, Peter Mallios, associate professor of English and American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, presents "H. L. Mencken, 'Foreign' Literature, and the Invention of Free Speech in Modern America."   He is the author of Our Conrad: Constituting American Modernity.

Recorded On: Saturday, September 10, 2011

Emerging from the funky blue-collar Baltimore that gave rise to Edgar Allan Poe, H. L. Mencken, Frank Zappa, and John Waters, Gus Russo nurtured an endless curiosity by inserting himself into the worlds of music, tennis, politics, and filmmaking. Boomer Days chronicles his memories of  the Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, the golden ages of tennis and music, and the rise of the counterculture.

Gus Russo is a veteran investigative reporter, musician, and author. He has written six books, including Brothers in Arms: The Kennedys, the Castros, and the Politics of Murder (coauthor: Stephen Molton), which won the 2008 History Prize at the New York Book Festival.

Recorded On: Thursday, September 8, 2011