Articles from %2 January, 2009

Kathryn Miles and dog Ari on WCSH 6 discussing ADVENTURES WITH ARI.

Three score and 10 years ago, a concert emancipated a dream

By Saul Austerlitz
April 26, 2009; Boston Globe

"The crowd condenses. It's standing room only, flowing the length of the reflecting pool and down West Potomac Park. The floor of this church is grass. The columns of this nave are budding trees. The vault above, an Easter sky." The date is April 9, 1939, the setting is the Lincoln Memorial, and the assembled audience is gathered prayerfully to hear Marian Anderson sing. Delia Dailey, proud scion of a "Talented Tenth" family, is about to meet the love of her life, physicist and German Jewish émigré David Strom. Black and white, African and European, intersect and commingle, and the dream of a race-blind, mulatto future is, if only for a brief hour, attained.

Delia and David...

Robin Abrahams, author of the forthcoming Mind Over Manners, was featured on the Today Show to discuss unemployment etiquette.

College Too Expensive? Try YouTube

By AP/JAKE COYLE
April 9, 2009; Time

 

In 2002, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched the MIT OpenCourseWare with the plan to make virtually all the school's courses available for free online.

As a visitor, one almost feels like you've somehow sneaked through a firewall. There's no registration and within a minute, you can be watching Prof. Walter Lewin demonstrate the physics of a pendulum by being one himself. (See the 50 best websites of 2008.)

Last December, MIT announced that OCW had been visited by more than 50 million people worldwide. But why would institutions that charges a huge price for admission give away their primary product?

Ben Hubbard, program manager of the webcast project for the University of California, Berkeley, believes it has always been a part of a university's...

Trinidad: The America Of The Caribbean

With a three-year economic lag behind the U.S., Trinidad should be preparing for the worst.

By Ramin Ganeshram
April 20, 2009; Forbes

 

PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad -- When I was a child visiting my father's country of Trinidad, where progress, it was often said, was roughly about 20 years behind the States, I could see this was true. By 1980, we had two color television sets in our home in New York, but the small 12-inch black and white TV my father brought to his family in Chaguanas was the only one on the block. The cases upon cases of beer and soda he bought to stock the kitchen when we visited were a wonder of excess to the neighbors, and our American clothes and shoes were a source of endless fascination to the local kids. Except for Coca Cola, Pepsi and some Nestle products,...

Deborah Cramer will speak at the Newburyport Literary Festival on April 25th, in Newburyport, Mass.

In addition to Cramer, on the roster for this year's festival are literary luminaries from every genre. To name just a few, this includes Anita Shreve, Julia Alverez, Elinor Lipman, Richard Bausch, Peter Orner, Lewis Turco, Anne Easter Smith, David Crouse, Junot Diaz, and Andre Dubus III.

To get more information about the festival, click here.

Featured Book for April 18th: Passing Strange, by Martha A. Sandweiss

 

Sandweiss takes a mountain of information and transforms it into a smooth, captivating narrative. Interspersed with the grand and poetic language of the day, the documented dialogue of King's correspondences lends literary panache to this captivating tale of love and the expansion of the American west.

To learn more about the author, read an excerpt or a review, click here.

Concert pays tribute to Marian Anderson

By Natasha T. Metzler, Associated Press Writer
April 13, 2009; AP

 

More than 2,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial for a concert honoring the 70th anniversary of Marian Anderson's historic performance there in 1939.

Because of the color of her skin, Anderson was denied the opportunity to perform at nearby Constitution Hall and local high school. So, instead, the opera singer sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in April 1939 to a 75,000-person crowd of blacks and whites standing together.

In the Sunday afternoon sunshine, African-American opera star Denyce Graves performed three of the same songs Anderson sang 70 years ago: "America (My Country, 'Tis of Thee)," "O, Mio Fernando" and "Ave Maria."

Wearing one of Anderson's old dresses, Graves...

Marian Anderson's Big Moment: A Look Back

Weekend Edition Sunday
April 12, 2009; NPR

 

Seventy years ago, a concert took place on Easter at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. At least 75,000 people attended the performance, which was heard across the country on NBC Radio. The performer was opera singer Marian Anderson.

The location for the concert was not chosen for its audience capacity. Anderson had tried to book Constitution Hall, but the Daughters of the American Revolution, which owned the hall, refused to let her perform there because she was black.

First lady Eleanor Roosevelt interceded and arranged for the alternate venue.

In his new book The Sound of Freedom, Raymond Arsenault argues that standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that Easter, Anderson set in motion events that would change the country.

"It was...

Web Exclusive Reviews: Week of 4/06/2009

April 6, 2009; Publisher's Weekly

Commemorating the 70th anniversary of African-American contralto Marian Anderson’s culture-shifting 1939 Easter Sunday performance at the Lincoln Memorial, the story of this underappreciated Civil Rights milestone resonates even louder in the wake of President Obama's election. Civil rights historian Arsenault (Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice) paints a detailed portrait of America's struggle for racial equality through one of the 20th century's most celebrated singers (of any color). Despite a 40-year career as a world-class entertainer, performing around the globe, Arsenault suffered innumerable racist indignities in her homeland, culminating in the controversial declaration by the Daughters of the American Revolution that barred her from performing in Washington, D.C.’s...