Paul Robeson Jr. (November 2, 1927 – April 26, 2014) spent much of his life preserving his father’s legacy, and in 1976, he came to the WNYC studios to share rare recordings spanning the performer’s influential life and singing career.

Robeson and Folk and Baroque host Dave Sear begin with some of Robeson Senior’s earliest Spiritual recordings from the 1920s and continue with a stirring performance of “John Henry” with Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and a rare gospel recording of “Oh When I Come to the End of my Journey.”

Following his father’s death in 1976, Robeson Jr. established the Paul Robeson Archives at Howard University and wrote extensively on the singer and activist’s life. Unlike his father, he was a member of the Communist Party from 1948 to 1962 and considered the party instrumental in the African-American civil rights movement. As a boy, Robeson lived with his grandmother in Moscow and later in life, became a Russian translator and a lecturer on Russian and American history.

Part two of the Robeson Jr. talk

From the February, 1944 WQXR Program Guide.

Dr. Edman, Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University and known for his many books, including the popular Philosopher’s Holiday, is one of WQXR most ardent fans. This philosophical reaction to music is one which we feel sure is shared by many of our listeners.

The fabled “discerning reader” will detect an echo in the title of this essay. The implied allusion to Proust is intentional. The whole of Proust’s great work is a monument to memory and a creative exercise in it. The recollection of a moment of sensation of the author’s childhood, the taste of a small cake dipped in tea, is the evocation of that complex structure of “time regained” which is Proust’s long novel.

Among the things that the narrator remembers with different coloring and contexts at various periods in his life is “the little phrase” of the imaginary composer. Vintueil, thought by many to be César Franck. “The little phrase” appears and reappears in  the composer’s work, now simple and unadorned, now embroidered, recast, reinforced, extended, and enriched with a thousand variations of harmonic and contrapuntal ingenuity. “The little phrase” reappears in the narrator’s life, frightened with all the cumulative poignancies of the past and fresher urgencies of the present, until it becomes a focus of life itself, the signature of the listener’s deepest feelings and ultimate character and destiny.

Music has, for all of us, its special “little phrases.” Listening becomes for us, especially the listening to quite familiar music, remembrance of themes past. No account of analysis of musical experience can be considered completes which neglects these overtones of reminiscence, these obbligati of association, often far from explicit, which accompany and lend depths of emotional coloring to what is, on the surface of consciousness, the most objective and puristic listening. Tune in on Symphony Hall some evening and hear the triumphant grand theme of the César Franc k symphony.  It seems less grand, perhaps, than it used to, and less original than once you thought. But it has regained the pathos of time and recollection. It has the feeling of something heard long ago, in your youth, perhaps, when it and everything, was fresh, and rapture in clear brasses seemed exactly the note for life just beginning its hopes and its own possible victories. Or you hear the slow movement of Mozart’s piano concerto, K. 467, and the haunting finality of the breathless, quiet, repeated beat of the single notes of the piano above the almost hushed orchestra at the close. That perfect peace, that peaceful perfection, are still what they were, but enriched now by the memory of their first discovery, played by Schabel, perhaps in Carnegie Hall, or in Queen’s Hall, London, now bombed out of existence. Or they are colored, too, by the many occasions when perhaps you played it on records yourself, for a friend now in Africa, or in the South Pacific, for another who wondered what you saw (or heard) in Mozart, or for a group of people, some now dead, or gone in any case out of your life. Or there sounds the hunting horn theme of King Mark in Tristan. What a melee of memory is telescoped into that, of the days when Tristan seemed pure ecstasy and the times when much of it seemed pure tripe, and of the damage done to your enjoyment of Wagner by pictures of Hitler at Bayreuth, or Wagner’s accounts of himself.

It may be the instant’s pause after the long architectural introduction, followed by the felicity of the clarinet in Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, mixed up perhaps with the memory of Benny Goodman playing non-Mozart at the San Francisco Fair. Or hints of remembered clarinet passages of Gluck and Brahms, so that this melody transmutes into pure essence all the clarinetism, as it were, of the history of music. 

Many themes you can scarcely hear as music at all, music pure and clear, so much they are qualified by conventional associations, the Wedding March, Handel’s Largo as heard at a funeral service, Tchaikowsky’s Andante Cantabile.

But the subtlest effects of memory-in-music are not those of definite labelled associations. They are the effects of purely melodic memory, so that a tone itself is it is in the context of what has gone before, what now reappears in the violins with its previous life in the horns subtly recollected in it. Musical attention is a half-listening to what is already an ancient legend  to the ear. And the tones have become tinctured with our own past, the patterns of sounds blended with the poignancies of biography, so that what we hear now is our whole history, and notes themselves become the wordless notebooks of our emotional lives.

It is because in music we are most intimately stirred to remembrance that listening is so poignant a pleasure. Hearing is so often rehearsing, and “heard melodies” are echoes of things unheard and unforgotten that are awakened by themes, past, now, memory rich, present acutely once again. 

Celtic Art in Europe:Making Connections. Essays in honour of Vincent Megaw on his 80th Birthday

(edited by C. Gosden, S. Crawford and K. Ulmschneider)

http://www.oxbowbooks.com/oxbow/celtic-art-in-europe.html

Photographer: Ian Cartwright

Above: some of the contributors with the birthday boy at Friday’s party.

Thanks to all the contributors, friends and family who came to celebrate, and to Erin, Nikki, Helen, Joanne and Rebecca for helping!

The Belgian waffle arrived at the New York World’s Fair 50 years ago, and breakfast was never the same. To celebrate such a sweet event, listen to this report on the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair —”the first World’s Fair of the Atomic Age!!”

The tasty, light waffle (technically a Brussels waffle) had failed to cause a sensation on its U.S. debut at the ’61 Seattle World’s Fair, but in New York it, um, fared better: MariePaule Vermersch, now 66, remembers helping her parents (her mother, 95, still lives in Queens) dish out the delicacies to endless lines of hungry Fair-goers for days on end.

Meanwhile, the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, the first one after WWII, did indeed host more than 40 million visitors. Its symbol was the Atomium, a 300-foot replica of a stylized atom —still a Brussels landmark.

Lots of people have heard Day-O!, which kicked off the Calypso Craze of 1957. Fewer know that calypso had been in vogue in the U.S. twice before: once in the late 1930s to early ‘40s, and again at the end of World War II. New York City, seat of the entertainment industry and home to a large West Indian-American population, was the epicenter of all three booms. In this centennial year of the first recorded vocal calypso, New York Public Radio explores pioneering calypso broadcasts on WNYC.

When 23-year-old Henrietta Yurchenco wangled a job at WNYC in 1939, she “didn’t know a microphone from a monkey wrench” (as she recalled decades later). But station director Morris Novik, who was “determined to change the station’s unimaginative programming,” couldn’t have made a better hire. The young leftist’s bohemian social circle put her “in the center of all that was new and exciting in New York’s musical scene,” and although Yurchenco was a classically trained pianist, she had long maintained an open-eared interest in “ethnic” music. Soon, she was featuring live performances of Flamenco guitar, African marimba, Chinese pipa, Indian sitar, and Brazilian folksong on her aptly named Adventures in Music.

It was American folk music, however, that quickly emerged as her chief interest; in fact, one of the first episodes of Adventures featured Woody Guthrie, Sarah Ogan, and Jim Garland singing songs of the Kentucky miners’ strike. But like Guthrie and his comrades in the Folk Revival (and “Chenk” would come to know all of them: Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Millard Lampell, Alan Lomax, Leadbelly, Burl Ives, Josh White, Aunt Molly Jackson, et al.), Yurchenco took a broad view of both “American” and “folk.”  That’s why Yurchenco put Trinidadian calypso on the air —years before Seeger and the “People’s Songs” crew made a point of including it in their Hootenannies and Midnight Specials.

As it happens, calypso was already in the air in late 1930s New York: since 1934, top calypsonians from Trinidad had made annual visits to the city, recording for Decca and gigging in clubs. The initial contingent appeared on Rudy Vallee’s “Fleischmann’s Hour” on NBC (their accompanying bandleader, Trinidadian expatriate Gerald Clark, subsequently got his own weekly radio show on WHN), while the 1937 cohort had patrons at Le Ruban Bleu standing on their chairs. By 1938, demand for calypso records—which for the first time were being sought in great numbers outside of the West Indies, Harlem, and San Juan Hill—sparked what Time magazine hailed as a “Calypso Boom”; soon Newsweek, Life, Billboard, and Modern Music (the League of Composers’ quarterly journal) noted the trend, too. In 1939 Decca issued an album of American-themed calypsos in its popular, rather than its “race” or export, series; its author, the Trinidadian Wilmoth Houdini, who’d been living and recording in New York for more than a decade, was profiled in the New Yorker and asked to sing at the opening of the World’s Fair. Meanwhile Max Gordon, proprietor of the up trending Village Vanguard, booked the “Calypso Recorders of Trinidad” in September 1939 and found his business had “more than doubled” at the end of ten weeks; not surprisingly, he continued to sign calypso acts regularly through the ‘40s and ‘50s.

The lead vocalist for the original Vanguard engagement was a lanky Trinidadian émigré who performed as “The Duke of Iron” (real name Cecil Anderson). At the time, Anderson’s resumé wasn’t long: he had recorded a handful of sides for Decca—pop tunes and novelty songs, oddly—with Gregory Felix’s “Krazy Kats” and four calypsos for the upstart budget label Varsity. Taking a chance, Yurchenco tapped Anderson to appear on WNYC, and his career took a decided jump.

Between April 13 and August 27, 1940, Yurchenco devoted five or more episodes of Adventures in Music to calypso, and at least two of them featured the Duke of Iron and his Trinidad Calypso Troubadors. By October she had given the Duke his own show, Calypso, which aired Saturdays at 1:30 (it later moved to 5:45); it’s likely that members of Gerald Clark’s Caribbean Serenaders served as the program’s house band. Surviving scripts show that the Duke typically sang a mix of originals, popular favorites and carnival hits by veteran calypsonians (“Ugly Woman,” “King Edward the VIII,” “Roosevelt in Trinidad,” “Mathilda,” etc.), and older tunes sung in patois. For one appearance on Adventures he composed an ode to WNYC and its champion, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who had recently saved the municipal station from the budget ax; for another, the Duke introduced coverage of the Democratic National Convention with a topical number about FDR’s nomination.

In the excerpt above, from the February 1, 1941 edition of Calypso, the Duke of Iron sings “Never Me In Matrimony”, one of several 1930s calypsos on the topic of marriage. Clearly meant for two singers, this debate sounds like one of the famous duets by Attila the Hun (Raymond Quevedo) and The Lion (Hubert Raphael Charles), composer of the hit “Ugly Woman.”

By March 8, 1941, Calypso had reached the end of its run, and a month later Yurchenco left WNYC to accompany her husband on a Mexican trip that turned out to be the start of her long career as a bona fide ethnomusicologist. (The Duke of Iron was also otherwise engaged: by fall, after further appearances at the Vanguard and the Apollo, he had moved on to a twice-weekly show on WOV and a season-long gig at Harlem’s Congress Casino.) 

Yurchenco was extraordinarily proud of her two years’ work at the station, however. She produced countless hours of folk music, a program focused on the contemporary avant-garde (Composers of Today and Tomorrow), and other Adventures “spin-offs” (South American Way, devoted to Latin popular music; Folk Songs of America, hosted by Leadbelly), as well as the first two American Music Festivals, for which she coordinated a diverse array of talent from the worlds of jazz, modern classical, and folk –including the Duke of Iron himself in 1941. But she regarded Adventures in Music as her crowning achievement, the earliest example of her lifelong dedication to what she called “world folk.” 

Her enthusiasm for calypso seems to have spread to others at the station. On the back side of a page of one draft script is a fragment of a mock-calypso about “Mrs. Yurchenco,” apparently penned by her longtime writer, Paul Kresh. “She keep the boys at the station in line,” it begins, in mid-stanza:

She come down each day at one
And then the folk singers start havin’ fun.

One likes to think the listeners enjoyed themselves, too.

I am delighted to announce that we have nearly completed cataloging the whole of the Younghee Kim-Wait/Pablo Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection. As of this morning, 1,372 titles are now included in the Five College Libraries Catalog and the books themselves are on the shelves in the Archives & Special Collections ready to be used. (Except for those on display in our current exhibition: Native Voices/Native Books, on view through July 31.) Our spectacular catalogers expect to wrap up cataloging the last few items by the end of May.

As soon as the cataloging of the Kim-Wait/Eisenberg books is finished, we will turn our attention to working through the 500+ books we recently purchased to build on that collection. Last month we took delivery of another 20 cartons of books, this time from the personal collection of Joseph Bruchac, noted author, editor and publisher. Bruchac’s personal papers — his manuscripts, correspondence, and other documents of his deep involvement with Native American writing — are held by the Beinecke Library at Yale University. The books we acquired were owned by Joseph Bruchac, but are generally not particularly rare or valuable in and of themselves.

So why did we purchase this collection?

Because of items like these:

Masterpieces of American Indian Literature (1993)

The Portable North American Indian Reader (1974)

The stated goal of our collection is to document as thoroughly as possible the full spectrum of Native American writing and intellectual life from the 18th century to the present. These two books are excellent examples of what we mean when we say “as thoroughly as possible.” These two items tell us something about popular perceptions of Native writing in our own time, just as a first edition of Black Elk Speaks (1932) or The Life, History, and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh (1847) tells us something about those perceptions in the past.

I particularly like Masterpieces of American Indian Literature, because all of the titles collected in this anthology are available in first editions in the Kim-Wait/Eisenberg Collection, enabling scholars to compare the ways these texts are packaged for different purposes and different audiences.

Masterpieces of American Indian Literature, back of dustjacket.

I find the use of terms like “Classics” and “Masterpieces” here fascinating. How have books like these altered the canon of American literary studies over the last 30, 40, 50 years?

Another item from the Bruchac collection illustrates the broader history of Native American writing as a subject for academic study and research:

Redefining American Literary History (1990)

This volume of essays includes several that specifically address Native writers, but there are also essays on African-American writers, Asian-American writers, Chicano writers, and more. We want scholars to use our collection to study not just the original texts of Native authors, but the processes by which those texts disappear and resurface throughout history.

These are just three of the more than 500 books in the Bruchac collection, which also includes books by Native writers not already held in the Kim-Wait/Eisenberg Collection, along with many more examples of anthologies, textbooks, and secondary sources that provide context for the study of Native intellectual life.

As exciting as the Bruchac collection is, I am equally excited by a single volume that we acquired earlier this month:

Samson Occom’s 1772 Sermon translated into Welsh. (1827)

The earliest item in the Kim-Wait/Eisenberg Collection is the copy of the 1772 fourth edition of Samson Occom’s A Sermon: Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, An Indian… We also hold two copies of the 1788 London edition of the same Sermon, but I was amazed to learn that it was then translated into Welsh in 1789. While we hold out hope that we may someday add a copy of that 1789 Welsh edition to our collection, we are greatly pleased to have acquired the 1827 reprint of that Welsh edition. According to Worldcat, only two other libraries in the entire world hold copies of this edition.

So when we say we want to document as thoroughly as possible the full spectrum of Native American writing and intellectual life from the 18th century to the present, this is what we are talking about. We will continue to add books, both rare and common, to meet that goal.

I am delighted to announce that we have nearly completed cataloging the whole of the Younghee Kim-Wait/Pablo Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection. As of this morning, 1,372 titles are now included in the Five College Libraries Catalog and the books themselves are on the shelves in the Archives & Special Collections ready to be used. (Except for those on display in our current exhibition: Native Voices/Native Books, on view through July 31.) Our spectacular catalogers expect to wrap up cataloging the last few items by the end of May.

As soon as the cataloging of the Kim-Wait/Eisenberg books is finished, we will turn our attention to working through the 500+ books we recently purchased to build on that collection. Last month we took delivery of another 20 cartons of books, this time from the personal collection of Joseph Bruchac, noted author, editor and publisher. Bruchac’s personal papers — his manuscripts, correspondence, and other documents of his deep involvement with Native American writing — are held by the Beinecke Library at Yale University. The books we acquired were owned by Joseph Bruchac, but are generally not particularly rare or valuable in and of themselves.

So why did we purchase this collection?

Because of items like these:

Masterpieces of American Indian Literature (1993)

The Portable North American Indian Reader (1974)

The stated goal of our collection is to document as thoroughly as possible the full spectrum of Native American writing and intellectual life from the 18th century to the present. These two books are excellent examples of what we mean when we say “as thoroughly as possible.” These two items tell us something about popular perceptions of Native writing in our own time, just as a first edition of Black Elk Speaks (1932) or The Life, History, and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh (1847) tells us something about those perceptions in the past.

I particularly like Masterpieces of American Indian Literature, because all of the titles collected in this anthology are available in first editions in the Kim-Wait/Eisenberg Collection, enabling scholars to compare the ways these texts are packaged for different purposes and different audiences.

Masterpieces of American Indian Literature, back of dustjacket.

I find the use of terms like “Classics” and “Masterpieces” here fascinating. How have books like these altered the canon of American literary studies over the last 30, 40, 50 years?

Another item from the Bruchac collection illustrates the broader history of Native American writing as a subject for academic study and research:

Redefining American Literary History (1990)

This volume of essays includes several that specifically address Native writers, but there are also essays on African-American writers, Asian-American writers, Chicano writers, and more. We want scholars to use our collection to study not just the original texts of Native authors, but the processes by which those texts disappear and resurface throughout history.

These are just three of the more than 500 books in the Bruchac collection, which also includes books by Native writers not already held in the Kim-Wait/Eisenberg Collection, along with many more examples of anthologies, textbooks, and secondary sources that provide context for the study of Native intellectual life.

As exciting as the Bruchac collection is, I am equally excited by a single volume that we acquired earlier this month:

Samson Occom’s 1772 Sermon translated into Welsh. (1827)

The earliest item in the Kim-Wait/Eisenberg Collection is the copy of the 1772 fourth edition of Samson Occom’s A Sermon: Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, An Indian… We also hold two copies of the 1788 London edition of the same Sermon, but I was amazed to learn that it was then translated into Welsh in 1789. While we hold out hope that we may someday add a copy of that 1789 Welsh edition to our collection, we are greatly pleased to have acquired the 1827 reprint of that Welsh edition. According to Worldcat, only two other libraries in the entire world hold copies of this edition.

So when we say we want to document as thoroughly as possible the full spectrum of Native American writing and intellectual life from the 18th century to the present, this is what we are talking about. We will continue to add books, both rare and common, to meet that goal.

The vast majority of the Musicians Union collection has now been catalogued and added to our online catalogue. The collection includes material from Central and District offices and also material from over 65 branches of the Musicians Union spread across the whole of the United Kingdom from Aberdeen in the north, to Bournemouth in the south. As you might expect the records tell us much about the administration of the MU, its structure and operation. The campaigns around the use of recorded music, promoting live music as well as defending the terms and conditions of working musicians and supporting them in times of hardship are well documented throughout the branch records.

Minutes for Liverpool branch meeting 

For some branches we have a large number and a wide range of records. For example for Glasgow, Manchester and Liverpool we have records that reflect the size of the union in terms of individual members in those areas and the range of employment opportunities for musicians.

The minutes of committee meetings and correspondence record the concerns of the Union, for example in protecting terms and conditions of employment for musicians employed in local orchestras and in local theatres.  Liverpool minutes  MU/4/5/1/5

We have membership records that provide not only evidence of the size of the branches in terms of recorded members but also provide information which may be of interest to family historians. Membership registers include names, address, date of joining the union, instruments played and if the person had transferred from another branch or moved to another branch.  The membership records cover more than a century of MU membership from 1893 onwards.

Blackpool branch membership register

It is perhaps not surprising that the MU branches in these large cities produce many records; however some small towns also had very active branches. For example we have records from the Blackpool branch which reflect its history as a popular seaside resort with several theatres and attractions including the Tower Ballroom. The minutes of the Blackpool branch meetings and correspondence record negotiations with the Blackpool Tower Company over the terms and conditions of musicians. MU4/15/3/1

Use of recorded music at the Opera House, Blackpool.

The impact of historical events is also present in branch records for example the Blackburn branch was involved in negotiations with the local council for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953 and the use of recorded music. MU/4/11/3/1

Letter from Blackburn branch correspondence file.

The BBC looms large in many branches especially in those branches where members are employed in the BBC orchestras. Much of the correspondence of the Glasgow branch covers negotiations with the BBC over cuts to orchestras and the resulting strikes during the 1980’s.

Photographs taken during the 1980 BBC strike.

 The strike in Bournemouth in 1950 is well documented in a Strike Day by Day Scrap book MU4/18/5/1

Day by Day scrap book of the Bournemouth strike

In a one-hour talk that has the easy-going feel of a conversation in a diner, Nicholas Pileggi provides an account of how the Mafia came to power in New York City. 

Pileggi, born February 22, 1933, may well be America’s leading expert on the Mob.  He started reporting on the New York City underworld for the Associated Press in the 1950’s and in the late 1960’s began contributing gripping articles to New York Magazine about the activities of mobsters.  Pileggi’s book, Wiseguys: Life in a Mafia Family, about the organized crime career of Henry Hill, served as the basis for the acclaimed film, Goodfellas, for which he co-wrote the screenplay with Martin Scorsese.  He teamed up with Scorsese again to write the screenplay for Casino, based on the crime writer’s book, Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas. 

Pileggi’s 1988 talk is delivered at a time when John Gotti still held sway over the New York Mob, and before anyone had heard of Tony Soprano.  Filled with compelling vignettes, the writer’s lecture is also skillfully crafted.  He suggests that New York City, shaped by the corruption of Tammany Hall, was a perfect foil for La Cosa Nostra, which rode the wave of Southern Italian immigration to America in 1910.  Tammany Hall –itself a reaction to the aristocratic, blue-blood American ruling class — always relied on hoodlums to enforce its machine politics. 

Pileggi describes the New York Mafia, once known as the Seven Families, as a generational power structure.  Its members love and believe in their world and would rather die than leave it.  Thus, a mobster, knowing that his appointed ride in a car to New Jersey will be his last, spends his remaining free minutes giving a bartender the keys to his car and apartment, instead of trying to escape while he has the chance. 

The veteran crime writer says there are three essential bulwarks to Mob culture; the first of which is hard work.  As soon as they wake up in the morning, Pileggi says a Mafioso is “scheming about how to get over.”  The mobster, Paul Vario, insisted that his henchmen provide him with stolen credit cards which he would then use at a restaurant, risking arrest, because the illicit food “tastes sweeter.”  A notorious mob hit man, Dandy Jack Parisi, when asked why he went to Mass every day, replied that he “asks God to give me strength to steal.”

Pileggi describes the second hallmark of Mafia power as the willingness to descend into unpredictable, irrational, “nutty” violence.   Thus, a Mafia “made-man” can become murderous at the smallest insult, like getting bumped unintentionally in a bar.  Think of Joe Pesci, as the mobster Nicky Santoro, and that ballpoint pen in Casino.  “Mobsters aren’t people you want to hang around with,” Pileggi cautions with a chuckle.  “They’re the kind of guys who in high school would step on your glasses if you dropped them. . . . Compassion has been bred out of them.”  The threat of sadistic violence has given the Mob the leverage to muscle in on legitimate businesses and unions throughout New York City.  Violence is such a part of the internal code of the Mafia that beatings administered by police are accepted almost stoically as part of The Life.

The third essential element for Mafia cultural longevity is the ability to live in a protected environment, be it Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, Mulberry Street in Manhattan or Arthur Avenue in the Bronx.  They are limited, unsophisticated worlds, that — until recently — were impossible to penetrate by others.  Literally staring out from behind barroom windows, the Mob knows everyone who comes in and out of these neighborhoods.  The ordinary citizens in such confines are terrorized yet crudely protected by this constant underworld presence.  Pileggi relates one blood-curdling tale of a would-be rapist who made the fatal mistake of following a young woman home to her apartment building in a Mafia neighborhood.  

Pileggi doesn’t worry that his encyclopedic knowledge and reportage of Mob habits endangers his life.  “I am just an anthropologist.  Nobody shoots anthropologists,” he says to an audience member concerned about his personal safety.  The writer leaves it to professional law enforcement to arrest and prosecute organized crime. “I am not Dick Tracy, I just report.”

At the end of his lecture, Pileggi predicts the inevitable decline of organized crime.  He attributes this to changed social factors.  For one, too many children of Mafiosi are leaving The Life to live The American Dream, becoming dentists, lawyers, etc.  Pileggi believes Mob involvement in narcotics trafficking has also taken a toll on the organization.  Sellers and buyers of drugs don’t have the fortitude to maintain the internal code of loyalty and silence known as Omerta.  Mobsters and addicts, caught up in drug stings, have turned state’s evidence, bringing down dozens of their brethren.  Over the last two decades, the Mafia’s influence in New York City has declined dramatically, as turncoats and witness protection plans prove Pileggi’s thesis.

__________________________________________

Nicholas Pileggi’s orginal talk at the NYPL Celeste Bartos Forum was on January 26, 1988. The WNYC broadcast edition of his address was March 28, 1993.

Our fourth strategic goal, our most important goal, focuses on the real treasures of the National Archives–our staff.

Photograph of Female Statue, The Future, Located near the Pennsylvania Avenue Entrance to the National Archives Building, 06/30/1936. National Archives ID: 7657960

This goal highlights our commitment to provide our staff with the training, tools and opportunities necessary for the transition into a digital environment. We intend to support staff through creating a culture of empowerment, openness and inclusion through both our processes and new technology. And we want to ensure that we have a diverse workforce, equipped with the skills necessary to fulfill our mission.

The goal of “Building Our Future Through Our People” includes several initiatives. We plan to:

• Foster an employee development culture to promote learning and leadership by all.
• Cultivate a robust, well-connected internal communications environment to support informed action at all levels.
• Implement innovative practices and tools to recruit, sustain, and retain a 21^st century workforce.
• Create new career paths for NARA employees to ensure that we have the necessary competencies and skills in a digital environment.

As you can see from the initiatives, we take our commitment to the staff of the National Archives very seriously.  It is only by providing a supportive environment for our staff that any of our goals may be achieved.

This is the final post … [ Read all ]

As we were scanning another box of late 19th century lantern slides, we came across this lovely picture of the Duomo in Florence (Firenze), Italy….

Janice thought she had taken a very similar picture on a recent holiday, and brought her photograph in so that we could compare Florence then and now…

But when we put the two images side-by-side, something seems to be missing from the older picture – several medieval buildings have mysteriously disappeared!

The illusion of the disappearing buildings is created by distance and perspective. Although the images look similar at first glance, the modern picture is taken from very much further away from the Duomo than the original, and Janice was taking her photograph from a slightly different angle. Buildings which were outside the frame of the Victorian image appear in Janice’s photograph.

In this goal we recognize that public access to government information creates measurable economic value, which adds to the enduring cultural, historical, and evidentiary value of our records.

National Archives Identifier: 196401

When we talk about economic value, we are not talking about the appraised value or the replacement value of our records. Historically, we have talked about economic value in terms of the large number of jobs and economic activity that NARA generates. Examples include the local economic activity generated around our public programs; the numerous professional researchers and authors who write non-fiction and best-selling works of fiction based on NARA records; popular films that came to fruition only because of the existence and hard work of the National Archives.

“Maximize NARA’s Value to the Nation” charts a course forward from this legacy. The course forward supports our transition to digital government, so that we can quickly and efficiently provide public access to our records. We want to ensure our historical government data is accessible by customers when they need it and in the format or technology platform that is easy for them to use. And when we talk about economic value today, we are not talking about commercial value only. We are expanding this idea beyond a simple commercial concept, to consider the social valuation of our returns on investment. These are opportunities to … [ Read all ]

The Digital Projects team announces the debut of several new digital collections:

• Charles Duncan McIver Records
  This collection makes available the papers of UNCG’s founder and first president, largely in their entirety. Comprising over 123,000 pages of material, the McIver Records document the founding and early years of the North Carolina State Normal and Industrial School (now UNCG) and include material on early construction, the typhoid epidemic, and the fire that destroyed Brick Dormitory. This collection was digitized as part of the larger Textiles, Teachers, and Troops grant project funded through an LSTA grant administered by the North Carolina State Library.
• Robert Watson Papers
  The Robert W. Watson Manuscripts date from 1948 to 1980 and contain manuscripts, typescripts, publisher’s proofs and galleys, clippings, correspondence, photographs, and reviews. Watson was the main architect of UNCG’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program, considered one of the best in the nation. The Watson Papers have been digitized almost in their entirety (nearly 6000 pages of material); several folders were skipped due to copyright concerns. 
• Home Economics, Food, and Nutrition Pamphlets Collection
  The Home Economics and Nutrition Pamphlets Collection consists of government and commercial publications on the subject of home management and nutrition and include educational materials, recipes, household hints, and other materials. The digital collection was built from resources held in the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives and the University Libraries Government Documents Collection. All materials are presumed to be in the public domain. The Government Documents portion of the collection was digitized as UNCG’s contribution to the ASERL Centers of Excellence Program. Additional materials will be added in subsequent phases.

In September, 1983, The poet Church Wachtel spoke about his third book and first novel, Joe the Engineer, with Walter James Miller on The Reader’s Almanac. The main  character is a Vietnam Veteran working as a water meter reader in the Richmond Hill section of Queens. 

Louis Untermeyer was poet and critic was appointed the fourteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1961. In this 1963 interview he talks about his close friend the poet Robert Frost and the book: The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer on this edition of The Reader’s Almanac with host Warren Bower.

This year marks the centennial of Dylan Thomas’ birth. Listen now to an interview with Thomas by Vivienne Koch airing on WNYC’s Reader’s Almanac, in 1952, a year before his death. He talks about his latest collection of poems in In Country Sleep and reads selections.

In this December, 1977 interview on the Reader’s Almanac, Robert Pinsky discusses his critical work, The Situation of Poetry, and his collection of poems, Sadness and Happiness. He talks with host Walter James Miller about how poetry can be anti-modern yet still contemporary. He also reads “Poem About People” from Sadness and Happiness

Poet Helen Morrisey Rizzuto says “poems capture a moment in time and render that moment timeless” and that  “all poems begin with an impulse and end…with a discovery.”  On WNYC’s Reader’s Almanac in February, 1979, Poet Helen Morrisey Rizzuto spoke with host Walter James Miller about her work, Evening Sky on a Japanese Screen and read selections from it. 

In 2004 Samuel Menashe became the first poet honored with the “Neglected Masters Award” given by Poetry magazine and the Poetry Foundation. The award was also to include a book to be published by the Library of America, which turned out to be a “Selected Poems” edited by Christopher Ricks.

More than twenty years earlier, Menashe joined Reader’s Almanac host Walter James Miller in the WNYC studio to talk about his poetry and its criticism. 

In April, 1968 Poet, writer, and former Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish spoke with Reader’s Almanac host Warren Bower. The three-time Pulitzer Prize winner discusses his poetry and reads selections from his , then, latest book of poems, Songs of Eve.