People associate many things with New Orleans—Mardi Gras, the French Quarter, Bourbon Street, Cajun food, and great jazz—just to name a few. So, could there be a better place in America to have an annual music festival? Between April 26 and May 5, 2013, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival will again give fans a rich taste of not only jazz and related music genres, but also Louisiana food, crafts, and culture.

As seen in the newspaper article below, the first New Orleans Jazz Fest took place in April 1970. The list of 200 performers included Mahalia Jackson, Al Hirt, Pete Fountain, Duke Ellington, and the Preservation Hall Band. The producer was George Wein, creator of the Newport (Rhode Island) Jazz Festival. Wein said, "Newport was manufactured but New Orleans is the real thing." 

Tickets were reasonably priced, as one can see by this festival advertisement.    

Upon completion, Afro-Americana Imprints, 1535-1922: From the Library Company of Philadelphia will provide researchers with more than 12,000 printed works on diverse aspects of African American history, literature and culture. Among the more than 1,300 items in the April 2013 release are these six:

• Hotel keepers, head waiters, and housekeepers' guide. By Tunis G. Campbell. Published in 1848 (Imprint #1992)

[Campbell, a freeborn African-American, and later an important figure in Reconstruction, wrote this guide while he was a hotel steward. His system for running a high-class dining room calls for military-style drills, but also insists that employers treat waitstaff with dignity. Nearly half the book is devoted to recipes, including eel soup, stewed hare and orange puffs.]

• The life of Africaner, a Namacqua chief, of South Africa. By the Rev. J. Campbell. Published in 1825 (Imprint #1974)

• What have we, as individuals, to do with slavery? By Susan C. Cabot. Published in 1855 (Imprint #1921)

• Record of the services of the Seventh Regiment, U.S. colored troops from September, 1863, to November, 1866 by an officer of the regiment. Published 1878 (Imprint #1945)

• Thoughts on the original unity of the human race ... By Charles Caldwell, M.D. Published in 1852 (Imprint #1935)

In the April 15 issue of Library Journal, Gail Golderman and Bruce Connolly review nine collections of primary-source materials related to the American Civil War.  Among these resources is The Civil War: Antebellum Period to Reconstruction—a thematic Readex collection created from multiple Archive of Americana collections.  Here’s a brief excerpt from their newest e-reviews column:

"Reduced to its bare essentials, The Civil War: Antebellum Period to Reconstruction—with 150 newspapers from across the country, roughly 50,000 documents culled from the U.S. Congressional Serial Set, and 4,000 rare broadsides and ephemeral items—is a singularly impressive primary-source collection....there is a lot more here than the numbers alone convey.  

"The broad geographic sweep of these newspaper titles puts the regional perspectives and regional biases necessary to comprehend the meaning of this period of American history at the researcher's disposal....

"The huge U.S. Congressional Serial Set is one of the underappreciated gems among all the publications of the federal government....

It was January 1990, and I looked out my dorm window at the snow falling, yet again.  Forecasters were calling for nine more inches, adding to the foot already on the ground. Winter in upstate New York can be brutal, and the thought of trudging across campus to the library to research my Modern History thesis wasn't appealing.  But following a recent class discussion about why so many Germans blindly followed Hitler's insane directives, I wanted to explore why so many Chinese citizens blindly followed the Red Guards and Mao Zedong during the infamous Chinese Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1978.  In 1990, China was still reeling from the horrors of the Tiananmen Square massacre the year before, and I wanted to understand these questions, “How did Mao build such a cult of personality and incite mass imprisonment, torture and public humiliation of its citizens, and was China headed back towards a new kind of revolution?“