Enoch Pratt Free Library Podcast

Deep within the forest green, in a magical and secret place, the gentle, green dragon resides! Come hear dragon tales as part of our Fairy Tale Festival.Recorded On: Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Navigating the 1940 Census, an examination of the 1940 count, will introduce users to the data that will be released on April 2, 2012.Thomas MacEntee brings his considerable knowledge and experiences to Baltimore for the first time. He is a professional genealogist who specializes in the use of social media and technology in family history research and is the creator of GeneaBloggers.com and High-Definition Genealogy. A Chicago resident, he is frequently featured at genealogy conferences and workshops across the U.S.  Recorded On: Saturday, March 31, 2012

Justin Jones-Fosu's book, Finding Your Glasses: Revealing and Achieving Authentic Success, is a practical guide to help you find your prescription for success in life. Find out if you are really living your life according to your core values and not by society's definition of success. Pursue what really matters to you as you join the journey of "finding your glasses."Justin Jones-Fosu is president of Justin Inspires International and the author of Inspiration for Life. He hosts a weekly radio show, "Listen UP with Justin Jones-Fosu," on WEAA 88.9FM. In 2008 he was named one of "30 Young Leaders Under 30 On the Rise" by Ebony magazine.  Recorded On: Thursday, March 29, 2012

In her new book, Fran Allen McKinney shares the inspirational, encouraging, and motivating sayings she has authored and collected over the years. "Life comes at you from every angle, with any issue, for no reason, without regard for order or organization," she writes. "Expecting the best and preparing for the worst will keep you in a proactive posture and will be good for your health."A native of Omaha, Nebraska, McKinney served nearly eight years in the U.S. Marine Corps. She eared a Bachelor's degree in business from Johns Hopkins University and now serves as District Director of Congressman Elijah E. Cummings. She is president and CEO of Self Development Success (SDS), providing services for leadership coaching and nonprofit fundraising. Recorded On: Wednesday, March 28, 2012

In 1916 Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood, childhood friends and Smith College graduates, left their affluent lives in Auburn, New York, and went off to teach the children of homesteaders in a remote schoolhouse on the Western Slope of Colorado. Dorothy Woodruff was the grandmother of New Yorker executive editor Dorothy Wickenden. Nearly 100 years later Wickenden found the detailed, colorful letters the two women wrote to their families and set out to discover what two intrepid Eastern women found when they went West. Before joining the New Yorker in 1996, Dorothy Wickenden was national affairs editor at Newsweek (1993-1995)and was the longtime executive editor at The New Republic. She has also written for the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. Recorded On: Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Equal parts investigative legal history and compelling detective tale, Flagrant Conduct is the still-untold story of Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark Supreme Court decision that promises to be the Brown v. Board of gay rights. From the 1998 arrest of Houston defendants John Lawrence and Tyron Garner, charged with sodomy in Lawrence's own bedroom, to the stirring Supreme Court ruling five years later, Flagrant Conduct is an insightful work of formidable scholarship.Drawing from dozens of new interviews that yield surprising new evidence, Dale Carpenter reexamines the motives of almost every character involved, from the arresting police officers to the brilliant gay-rights attorneys, whose maneuuverings brought the case to national attention, to the nine Supreme Court justices, whose predispositions are on full display. With the legal battle over gay marriage looming, this first complete history of Lawrence v. Texas, which expanded the legal rights of millions of gay and lesbian Americans, could not be timelier.

Jane Satterfield is the author of two poetry collections: Assignation at Vanishing Point and Shepherdess with an Automatic. Among her awards are an N.E.A. Fellowship and the Faulkner Society Gold Medal, as well as residencies from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. A new manuscript, Her Familiars, was a finalist for this year’s National Poetry Series, and her poem, “The War Years,” won the 2011 Mslexia Poetry Competition. Ned Balbo received the 2010 Donald Justice Prize for The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems. His previous books are Lives of the Sleepers, Galileo’s Banquet, and the chapbook Something Must Happen. He has received three Maryland Arts Council grants, the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Award, and the John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize. He teaches at Loyola University Maryland. Virginia Crawford, Poet-in-Residence with the Maryland State Arts Council, teaches through the Artists-in-Education program. Her first collection of poems, Touch, was featured on WYPR’s Maryland Morning. Her p

Undoubtedly the most influential advocate for birth control even before the term existed, Margaret Sanger ignited a movement that has shaped our society to this day.Her views on reproductive rights have made her a frequent target of conservatives and so-called family values activists. Yet lately even progressives have shied away from her, citing socialist leanings and a purported belief in eugenics as a blight on her accomplishments. In this new biography, historian Jean H. Baker rescues Sanger from such critiques and restores her to the vaunted place in history she once held.Trained as a nurse and midwife in the gritty tenements of New York's Lower East Side, Sanger grew increasingly aware of the dangers of unplanned pregnancy, both physical and psychological. Following a botched abortion and the death of the mother, Sanger quickly became one of the loudest voices in favor of sex education and contraception. The movement she started spread across the country, eventually becoming a vast international organiza

In 2008 Peggielene Bartels received a call from a cousin in Ghana: her uncle had died, and Peggielene was now the King of Otuam, a fishing village with 7,000 residents. King Peggy chronicles the astonishing journey of a middle-aged secretary in Washington, DC, struggling to make ends meet, who suddenly finds herself responsible for the future of a town half-a-world away. Recorded On: Sunday, March 11, 2012

A panel of four women writers from across the globe discusses the intersection of place, time and culture in literature and in the lives of women. The conversation will be moderated by Linda A. Duggins, Hachette Book Group.Leila Cobo, a Fulbright scholar from Cali, Colombia, is a novelist, pianist, TV host, and executive editor for Latin content and programming for Billboard. She is considered one of the country's leading experts on Latin music. She is the author of Tell Me Something True. Her second novel, The Second Time We Met (Grand Central Publishing), will be released February 29, 2012. (www.leilacobo.com)Jacqueline Luckett is the author of Searching for Tina Turner and the newly published Passing Love (Grand Central Publishing). She participated in the Voices of Our Nations (VONA) writing workshops and, in 2004, formed the Finish Party along with seven other women writers-of-color. (www.jacquelineluckett.com)Bernice L. McFadden is the author of seven critically acclaimed novels, including Sugar and Glo

Enjoy the sounds of music from long, long ago, as talented young musicians perform works from the medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque eras on faithful reproductions of period instruments.   Recorded On: Saturday, March 10, 2012

What was he like? Jack Kennedy said that the reason people read biographies was to answer that question. Chris Matthews has devoted years studying the life of Jack Kennedy. to find out what he was like. From interviews with prep school classmates and college friends to war buddies and political associates, Matthews gives us an intimate picture of John F. Kennedy's coming-of-age. "In searching for Jack Kennedy," writes Matthews, "I found a fighting prince never free from pain, never far from trouble, never accepting the world he found, never wanting to be his father's son. He was a far greater hero than he ever wished us to know."Chris Matthews is the host of MSNBC's Hardball and NBC's The Chris Matthews Show. His bestselling books include Hardball; Kennedy & Nixon; Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think; and American: Beyond Our Grandest Notions. Recorded On: Thursday, March 8, 2012

Grocery prices and the forsaken foods at the back of your refrigerator seem to increase weekly. After reading American Wasteland, you will never look at your shopping list, refrigerator, plate or wallet the same way again. Jonathan Bloom wades into the garbage heap to unearth what our squandered food says about us, why it matters, and how you can make a difference starting in your own kitchen -- reducing waste and saving money. Interviews with experts such as chef Alice Waters and food psychologist Brian Wansink, among others, uncover not only how and why we waste, but, most importantly, what we can do about it.Jonathan Bloom is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University.Presented in partnership with United Way of Central Maryland, Wesleyan University, and JHU Center for a Livable Future.  Recorded On: Monday, March 5, 2012

The cross and the lynching tree are the two most emotionally charged symbols in the history of the African American community. In this powerful new work, theologian James H. Cone explores these symbols and their interconnection in the history and souls of black folk. In a work that spans social history, theology, and cultural studies, Professor Cone explores the message of the spirituals and the power of the blues; the passion and death of Emmet Till and the engaged vision of Martin Luther King, Jr. He invokes the spirits of Billie Holiday and Langston Hughes, Fannie Lou Hamer and Ida B. Wells, and the witness of black artists, writers, preachers, and fighters for justice. And he remembers the victims, especially the 5,000 who perished during the lynching period. Through their witness he contemplates the greatest challenge of any Christian theology -- to explain how life can be made meaningful in the face of death and injustice.James H. Cone, Charles A. Briggs Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology at

For a century Harlem has been celebrated as the capital of black America, a thriving center of cultural achievement and political action. At a crucial moment in Harlem's history, as gentrification encroaches, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts untangles the myth and meaning of Harlem's legacy. Examining the epic Harlem of official history and the personal Harlem that begins at her front door, Rhodes-Pitts introduces us to a wide variety of characters, past and present. She compares her own experience of moving to Harlem with accounts from literature of the Harlem Renaissance. A graduate of Harvard University, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts received the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award and was a Fulbright Scholar for 2006-07. Recorded On: Wednesday, February 29, 2012

In Out of Left Field, Rebecca Alpert explores how Jewish sports entrepreneurs, political radicals, and a team of black Jews from Belleville, Virginia called the Belleville Grays -- the only Jewish team in the history of black baseball -- made their mark on the segregated world of the Negro Leagues. Through in-depth research, Alpert tells the stories of the Jewish businessmen who owned and promoted teams as they both acted out and fell victim to pervasive stereotypes of Jews as greedy middlemen and hucksters. Some Jewish owners produced a kind of comedy baseball, similar to basketball's Harlem Globetrotters, that reaped financial benefits for both owners and players but also played upon the worst stereotypes of African Americans and prevented these black "showmen" from being taken seriously by the major leagues. Alpert also shows how Jewish entrepreneurs, motivated in part by the traditional Jewish commitment to social justice, helped grow the business of black baseball in the face of oppressive Jim Crow restr

With Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), Phillis Wheatley became the first English-speaking person of African descent to publish a book and only the second woman -- of any race or background -- to do so in America. Written in Boston while she was just a teenager, and still a slave, Wheatley's work was an international sensation. In Phillis Wheatley, Vincent Carretta offers the first full-length biography of a figure whose origins and later life have remained shadowy despite her iconic status.A scholar with extensive knowledge of transatlantic literature and history, Carretta uncovers new details about Wheatley's origins, her upbringing, and how she gained freedom. Assessing Wheatley's entire body of work, he discusses the likely role she played in the production, marketing, and distribution of her writing. She developed a remarkable network that transcended racial, class, political, religious, and geographical boundaries.Vincent Carretta is a professor of English at the University of Maryla

In Delirium, Nancy L. Cohen tells the story of a little-known shadow movement that has fueled America's political wars for 40 years. She traces our current political crisis back to the rise of a well-organized, ideologically driven opposition movement to turn back the sexual revolution, feminism, and gay rights. This sexual counterrevolution, Cohen shows, has played a leading role in shattering both political parties, dividing Americans into irreconcilable warring camps, and polarizing the nation.Nancy L. Cohen is a historian, writer and contributor to The Huffington Post. She is the author of two books, including The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1914. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Business History Review, and elsewhere.  Recorded On: Tuesday, February 21, 2012

A family's recently discovered correspondence provides the inspiration for this fascinating and deeply moving account of Jewish family life before, during and after the Holocaust. Rebecca Boehling and Uta Larkey reveal how the Kaufmann-Steinberg family was pulled apart under the Nazi regime and dispersed over three continents. The family's unique eight-way correspondence across two generations brings into sharp focus the dilemma of Jews in Nazi Germany facing the painful decisions of when, if, and to where they should emigrate. Boehling and Larkey capture the family members' fluctuating emotions of hope, optimism, resignation and despair, as well as the day-to-day concerns, experiences and dynamics of family life despite increasing persecution and impending deportation. Headed by two sisters who were among the first female business owners in Essen, the family was far from conventional, and their story contributes new dimensions to our understanding of Jewish life in Germany and in exile during these dark year

The first of two novels based on the slave revolt led by Nat Turner, Part One: The Witnesses is a fact-based epic that discredits the primary historical source document, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831), which served as the basis for William Styron's novel. Foster located the original handwritten trial transcripts in which Turner actually pled innocent and offered no confession. During five years of research, she interviewed descendants of those killed, Turner's family, friends and foes, and analyzed related trial transcripts. Sharon Ewell Foster is the author of seven novels, including Passing by Samaria. She describes her new novel as "Roots meets The Da Vinci Code.''' Recorded On: Sunday, February 19, 2012