Day: April 25, 2019

A 17th century Geneva Bible, one of the hundreds of rare books authorities said were stolen from a Pittsburgh library as part of a 20-year-long theft scheme, is back home.

The Bible, published in 1615, was traced to the American Pilgrim Museum in Leiden, about 45 miles (70 kilometers) from Amsterdam in the Netherlands, said FBI agent Robert Jones.

It was among more than 300 rare books, maps, plate books, atlases and more that were discovered missing from the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh last year. A former archivist at the library and a rare book dealer are accused of stealing books valued at more than $8 million.

The Bible “is more than a piece of evidence” Jones said Thursday at a news conference in Pittsburgh. “I am happy to say it has finally made its way back to its rightful owner here in Pittsburgh.”

There are several similar Bibles, Jones said afterward. “From a dollar-figure sense, it is not priceless,” he said. “From a history perspective, it is priceless.”

The Dutch museum had paid $1,200 for the Bible, District Attorney Stephen Zappala Jr. said.

The first edition of the Geneva Bible was published in 1560. This particular edition, published in London four years after the first King James version, is similar to a Bible known to have been brought over by the Pilgrims in 1620, Jones said.

The FBI will hand over the Bible to Allegheny County prosecutors, who will return it to the library, Zappala Jr. said.

After charges were filed last year, Zappala said, the director of the Dutch museum contacted police in The Hague and the Carnegie Library, which in turn contacted the FBI in Pittsburgh. 

The FBI in The Hague worked with the museum and then shipped the Bible to FBI offices in Pittsburgh, said FBI agent Shawn Brokos.

Wearing blue latex gloves, she displayed the Bible, carefully opening its weathered pages.

The FBI hopes news of the recovery of this Bible will prompt others to look at their collections for any possible items stolen from the Pittsburgh library. “Some probably are in private collections,” he said.

Prosecutors in Pittsburgh have so far recovered 18 of the books stolen from the library, Zappala said. They have been found in the U.S. and abroad.

One copy of Isaac Newton’s “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica,” a watershed of science valued at $900,000, and John Adams’ “A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America,” valued at $20,000, are among the items prosecutors have recovered, Zappala’s spokesman said.

One of the books not yet recovered is “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” the magnum opus by philosopher Adam Smith, valued at $180,000.

The room at the Carnegie Library where the stolen items were on display remains closed. Zappala said he will discuss with the Carnegie Library on displaying this Bible to the public. 
…

The 18th Tribeca Film Festival moved uptown on Wednesday for an opening night that honored an elder New York institution: the Apollo Theater.

Roger Ross Williams’ “The Apollo” premiered at the iconic Harlem music hall whose 85-year history is chronicled in Williams’ documentary. The movie and setting added up to a gala tribute to the 125th Street mecca of African American culture, where everyone from Ella Fitzgerald to James Brown to Chris Rock has come to forge their legacies.

“The story of black people in America is the story of the Apollo,” Williams said in an interview ahead of the premiere.

Tribeca isn’t the first New York film festival to uproot to the Apollo for a special event. Lincoln Center’s New York Film Festival came there last year to debut Barry Jenkins’ James Baldwin adaptation “If Beale Street Could Talk.”

But Tribeca, the festival founded by Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal, has made a habit of celebrating the city’s cultural institutions on opening night through documentaries about “Saturday Night Live” and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“In these disturbing times, when the administration is promoting divisiveness and racism, we’re making a statement by being here tonight that we reject it,” said De Niro, a well-known critic of President Donald Trump, introducing the film on the Apollo stage. “No, you don’t! Not in this house, not on this stage!”

“The Apollo,” which HBO will air in the fall, survey’s the theater’s expansive history but also its vibrant present. It follows the production of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me,” a production that Apollo president Jonelle Procope says perfectly reflects the theater’s mission for the future.

“We want to develop this new 21st century performing arts canon that focuses on telling the African American and African diaspora stories,” said Procope. “We are really the only performing arts organization in the country that is from a performing arts standpoint focused on the African American narrative. Our legacy is to create opportunities for emerging talent and nurture their talent and let them push the envelope.”

Opened in 1914 as a burlesque theater, the Apollo began catering to the black community in the 1930s. Its famed Amateur Night, begun in 1934, has been the first introduction of countless stars, including Fitzgerald, Stevie Wonder (introduced as a 12-year-old “genius”) and the Supremes.

Amateur night remains the signature Apollo show: a crucible through which endless performers have had to pass to confirm their talent. Anyone lacking will hear it from the audience. In Williams’ film, Dave Chappelle is seen saying his Apollo experience was the best thing that ever happened to him. “After that, I was fearless,” says Chappelle.

“I grew up in the black church and there’s a very similar dialogue that happens, the call and the response,” said Williams. “The Apollo, in a sense, is church. It’s a sacred space and a gathering of community in Harlem.”

The Apollo’s history can be staggering. Through its doors have come Duke Ellington, Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Smokey Robinson and Richard Pryor. James Brown recorded one of the most revered live albums at the Apollo.

“When we first watched the film, I had this gut-wrenching emotional reaction. I was just crying like a baby,” said Williams. “The journey that black people have taken in America is a painful and difficult journey and our music is one of the tools we use to talk about that pain, to talk about that oppression, to escape from that pain. Our musical journey is a powerful one.”

With such an overwhelming legacy, the Apollo has striven to be more than a museum. After falling on hard times in the 1970s, it was named a state and city landmark in 1983. It was purchased by New York State in 1991 and turned into a nonprofit theater. Its long-running variety show “Showtime at the Apollo” was most recently rebooted on Fox last year.

Now, for the first time in its history, it’s plotting an expansion. The Apollo Performing Arts Center plans to in the fall of 2020 open two adjacent theaters, two doors down from the Apollo. One will seat 99, the other 199 — much smaller spaces than the 1,506 capacity Apollo.

Procope said the new theaters will allow the Apollo to program more expansively, add master artist residencies, host more speaking series, delve deeper into dance and create new streaming and podcasting possibilities.

“I think people understand where we’ve been,” said Procope. Soon, she says, they will see where the Apollo is going.
…

The 25th James Bond movie and Daniel Craig’s last one as 007 is heading home to Jamaica.

Craig, Bond producers and director Cary Fukunaga on Thursday launched the film from the Caribbean island nation where Ian Fleming wrote all of his Bond novels. The still untitled film will be partly set in Jamaica, also a setting in “Dr. No” and “Live and Let Die.”

Rami Malek is joining the cast as the villain. The recent Oscar-winner said in a videotaped message that he’ll make sure Bond “will not have an easy ride of it” in Bond 25.

Fukunaga took over directing from Danny Boyle, who departed last year over creative differences. Bond 25 is due out in April 2020.
…

If your tastes are eclectic, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival poses a problem: Which of a dozen acts do you want to hear? Earth, Wind & Fire, Alanis Morissette, or Taj Mahal & the Phantom Blues Band? Van Morrison, Al Green, Johnny Rivers, or all five Marsalis jazzmen playing together?

The festival’s first producer recently contemplated the 50th anniversary lineup for the eight-day festival, which begins Thursday. “I think what I want to see is the Marsalis family together, because I haven’t seen them together for a long time,” George Wein, 93, said in a telephone interview.

Pianist Ellis Marsalis and his sons — trumpeter Wynton, saxophone player Branford, trombonist Delfeayo and percussionist Jason Marsalis — close out the festival’s first weekend at the Jazz Tent. It’s among 10 music stages and tents, along with the Kids’ Tent, an interview stage and a cultural exchange pavilion.

Other first-weekend acts include Katy Perry, Bonnie Raitt, Boz Scaggs and Santana.

There’s also a juried arts and crafts show, an African marketplace, a Louisiana heritage marketplace and enough food to leave you in a two-week-long stupor.

About 450,000 fans came last year, across seven days. Wein said he always knew the festival would grow, but not to the current extent.

The first Heritage Fair had more performers than audience members, as lesser-known locals performed at the daytime fair. Duke Ellington, Mahalia Jackson, Al Hirt, Pete Fountain and other top acts played at nighttime indoor Jazz Festival concerts.

The next year brought four night concerts and three afternoons in Congo Square, with four stages: blues, Cajun, gospel and street music. That first day was “a ragged little carnival of sound” with 25 acts sometimes clashing, The Associated Press wrote. The enclosure also held “two beer counters, a souvenir store, a cotton candy machine and a food tent where tourists tried red beans and rice but seldom braved the crimson boiled crawfish.”

One fan who had paid $2 demanded, “We drove all the way over here from Galveston to hear some jazz. Where is it?” Patty Mouton told Wein his Newport Jazz Festival was great, but “You call this jazz? That old woman singing hymns over there?”

“Sure that’s jazz,” he replied. “Those hymns are jazz and so is the guy beating on those oil drums. This is the grassroots jazz.”

The Heritage Fair moved in 1972 to the New Orleans Fair Grounds racetrack infield, where the New Orleans Jazz Festival and Heritage Fair is still held, adding a second weekend in 1976 .

New Orleans “Queen of Soul” Irma Thomas, who began playing Jazz Fest in 1974, said it gave local artists like herself a chance to be seen by national and international audiences.

“A lot of us worked for years without having agents, and Jazz Fest has been sort of the agent for the locals who have been around since mud and have not been recognized,” she said.

Gospel and Zydeco performers also began getting invitations to perform at other festivals and events worldwide after being heard at Jazz Fest, producer Quint Davis said.

By 1976, when about 175,000 people attended over six days, some people said the outdoor fair had grown too big, calling it Son of Mardi Gras.

The record crowd was an estimated 650,000 over seven days in 2001. That festival’s lineup included B.B. King, Dr. John, Widespread Panic, Van Morrison, Paul Simon, Allen Toussaint and the Neville Brothers.

Widespread Panic is back this year because health problems knocked the Rolling Stones and replacement Fleetwood Mac out of the lineup. Jerry Lee Lewis, 83, also had to send regrets after a stroke in March.

Wein’s favorite memory over the festival’s first 49 years is hearing Ella Fitzgerald and Stevie Wonder together.

It was in 1977. Wonder, at the height of his career, joined Fitzgerald on stage at the city’s Municipal Auditorium. They sang his 1973 hit, “You Are the Sunshine of My Life.”

“Stevie’s still a star,” Wein said.
…

Feminist author and activist Gloria Steinem once said, “Women have always been an equal part of the past. We just haven’t been a part of history.”

But American women became an important part of history when they gained the right to vote in 1920.

Making waves

Reaching that groundbreaking milestone was the culmination of decades of struggle by women working at the state and national levels for political empowerment. Women such as social reformer Susan B. Anthony, abolitionists Sojourner Truth and Lucy Stone, and activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who helped organize the first women’s rights convention in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York.

Now, a major new exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., explores that complex period in American history.  “Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence” offers a rich visual presentation of the women’s suffrage movement over a span of 130 years, ahead of the 100th anniversary of passage of the 19th Amendment.

Portraits of persistence

“As a historian, I was really interested to look at the 19th Amendment and what that meant in 1920, and how its legacy unfolded,” said historian and exhibit curator Kate Clarke Lemay.

She explained that the suffrage movement didn’t just appear out of nowhere.

“They had these abolitionist foundations. They had partnerships with the temperance movement. And that is really how they built momentum across the country in the very early stages.”

The seven-room exhibit features more than 120 objects from 1832 to 1965. Photographic portraits and paintings, videos depicting historical footage, and books, banners and posters, provide an in-depth look at the people and events that helped shape American history.

It highlights well-known and lesser-known figures associated with the women’s movement.

How many people know, for example, that Victoria Woodhull was the first woman to run for president, on a third party ticket in 1872? Or that activist Lucy Burns served six different prison sentences for picketing the White House? Or that a group of American women, while studying abroad in England, were inspired by the British suffragette movement to organize at home? Led by suffragist Alice Paul, they staged the first major nonviolent march on Washington on March 3, 1913, which attracted between 5,000 and 8,000 women.

Silent sentinels

“It’s really important for the Smithsonian, and certainly the National Portrait Gallery, to put faces to the women who really marched toward getting the vote and the passing of the 19th Amendment in 1920,” said Kim Sajet, National Portrait Gallery director.

“This exhibition is really about that journey, and about the women who really agitated for the vote, but also for the women who were left out of the history books,” she said. About a third of the collection includes representations of women of color, she said, “because they’ve really been erased from history in many ways.”

That includes African American women, who were often excluded by white women from the main suffrage organizations.

That is particularly relevant, given that “black women were organizing just as much as white women,” Lemay said.

“So this exhibition works to show a more complete history of the women’s suffrage movement by looking at biographies of African Americans, Native Americans, and other women of color, to complement the better-known story that we have in our textbooks.”

The exhibit includes abolitionist Sarah Parker Remond, who filed one of the earliest lawsuits protesting race segregation; Ida B. Wells, who advocated for federal laws against lynching; and Mary Church Terrell, who established the National Association of Colored Women.

Women today

American women have immense political power today, Lemay observed. They make up a huge voting bloc, more than 120 women now serve in Congress, and many others are in major leadership roles.

“If you start from where the exhibition starts in the 1830s … and then trace that thread with the suffrage movement up to this very day when women are actually leading our country, you can see the great continuum and the grand narrative journey that these women had to undergo to achieve that,” Lemay said. “And I’m really excited to see what happens from here on.”

“Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence” is part of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative, “Because of Her Story,” and one of the country’s most ambitious undertakings to research, collect, document, display and share the compelling story and history of American women. 

The museum hopes the exhibit, which runs through January 5, 2020, will deepen people’s understanding of women’s contributions to the nation and the world.
…

Feminism has been defined as “the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes,” and “organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests.” But the idea of feminism can vary depending on where you live. VOA correspondent Mariama Diallo looks into what feminism means for Africans.
…