Tonight I am planning on attending the New York Philharmonic’s performance in Central Park, presented by Didi and Oscar Schafer. I’m not a classical music buff but I have clearly heard of Tchaikovsky and Beethoven the first two composer’s on the bill. The third though, Sibelius gave me pause. So I turned to the new Oxford Music Online gateway which led me to The Oxford Companion to Music’s biography of Jean Sibelius, which I have excerpted below. Enjoy- and if you are in New York come listen tonight!

Sibelius, Jean (Julius Christian) [Johan Julius Christian Sibelius] (b Hämeenlinna, 8 Dec. 1865; d Järvenpää, 20 Sept. 1957).

Finnish composer. He was unquestionably the greatest composer Finland has ever produced and the most powerful symphonist to have emerged in Scandinavia. His father was a doctor in Hämeenlinna, a provincial garrison town in south-central Finland. Until he was about eight years old Sibelius spoke no Finnish. However, when he was 11 his mother enrolled him in the first grammar school in the country to use Finnish as the teaching language instead of Swedish and Latin. Contact with Finnish opened up to him the whole repertory of national mythology embodied in the Kalevala. His imagination was fired by this, as it was by the great Swedish lyric poets J. L. Runeberg and Viktor Rydberg and, above all, by the Finnish landscape with its forests and lakes.

In his youth Sibelius showed considerable aptitude on the violin and composed chamber music for his family and friends to play. There were few opportunities to hear orchestral music: even Helsinki did not have a permanent symphony orchestra until Robert Kajanus, later one of his staunchest champions, founded the City Orchestra in 1882. At first Sibelius studied law, but he soon abandoned it for music, becoming a pupil of Martin Wegelius. At about that time he decided to ‘internationalize’ his name (following the example of an uncle who had Gallicized his name, Johan, to Jean during his travels). It was not until he left Finland to study in Berlin and Vienna that he measured himself for the first time against an orchestral canvas.

It was in Vienna that the first ideas of the Kullervo symphony came to him, and it was this work, first performed in 1892, that put Sibelius on the musical map in his own country. The music that followed in its immediate wake is strongly national in feeling: the Karelia Suite, written for a pageant in Viipuri in 1893, has obvious patriotic overtones. So too has the music he wrote six years later for another pageant portraying the history of Finland which became a rallying-point for national sentiment at a time when Russia was tightening its grip on the country. One of its numbers, Finlandia, was to make him a household name; its importance for Finnish national self-awareness was immeasurable. From the time of Finlandia onwards, Sibelius was undoubtedly the best-known representative of his country, and many who would never otherwise have become aware of Finland’s national aspirations did so because of his music. (His birthday was a national event each year, and in 1935 his 70th culminated in a banquet at which were present not only all the past presidents of Finland but the prime ministers of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden.)

If the 1890s had seen the consolidation of Sibelius’s position as Finland’s leading composer, the next decade was to witness the growth of his international reputation. In 1898 he acquired a German publisher, Breitkopf & Härtel. (He later sold Valse triste to the firm on derisory terms, a decision he regretted to his dying day.) But his fame was not confined to Germany: Henry Wood included the King Christian II Suite at a Promenade Concert as early as 1901, and during the first years of the century his works were conducted by Hans Richter, Weingartner, Toscanini, and—in the case of the Violin Concerto—by no less a figure than his contemporary Richard Strauss. The Violin Concerto was very much a labour of love, as one would expect from a violinist manqué who had nursed youthful ambitions as a soloist.

Sibelius’s early compositions show the influence of the Viennese Classics, Grieg, and Tchaikovsky, and by the middle of the first decade of the 20th century, when Sibelius entered his 40s, his star had steadily risen. The Third Symphony (1907), however, brought a change in direction and showed Sibelius as out of step with the times. While others pursued more lavish orchestral means and more vivid colourings, his palette became more classical, more disciplined and economical. It was while he was in London working on his only mature string quartet, Voces intimae, that Sibelius first felt pains in his throat, and in 1909 he underwent specialist treatment in Helsinki and Berlin for suspected cancer. For a number of years he was forced to give up the wine and cigars he so enjoyed, and the bleak possibilities opened up by the illness served to contribute to the austerity, depth, and focus of such works as the Fourth Symphony (1911) and The Bard (1913). For tautness and concentration the Fourth Symphony surpasses all that had gone before. It baffled its first audiences and was declared ultra-modern; in Sweden it was actually hissed.

Although each of the symphonies shows a continuing search for new formal means, in none is that search more thorough or prolonged than in the Fifth (1915). Sibelius was a highly self-critical composer who subjected his music to the keenest scrutiny. In the early years of the 20th century En saga and the Violin Concerto were completely overhauled, and the Lemminkäinen Suite (1895) was revised twice, in 1897 and 1939. The Fifth Symphony gave him the most trouble of all: in its original form it was in four movements, and was first performed on his 50th birthday. It was turned into a three-movement work in the following year and entirely rewritten in 1919.

After World War I Sibelius’s music struck ever stronger resonances in England and the USA, and (perhaps because of that) fewer in Germany and the Latin countries. None of the symphonies is more radically different from the music of its time than the Sixth (1923), especially when compared with the music composed in the same year by Bartók, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Hindemith, and the members of Les Six. The one-movement Seventh Symphony (1924), which can be seen as the culmination of a search for organic unity, demonstrates the truth of the assertion that Sibelius never approached the symphonic problem in the same way. Tapiola (1926) crowns his creative achievement, evoking the awesome power of nature with terrifying grandeur. Of all his works this is the one that makes the most astonishingly original use of the orchestra.

Sibelius’s inner world was dominated by his love of the northern landscape, and of the rich repertory of myth embodied in the Kalevala. The classical severity and concentration of his later works was not in keeping with the spirit of the times, and after World War I he felt an increasing isolation. As he himself put it, ‘while others mix cocktails of various hues, I offer pure spring water’. For more than 30 years after the completion of his four last great works—the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies, the music for The Tempest, and Tapiola—Sibelius lived in retirement at Järvenpää, maintaining a virtually unbroken silence until his death in 1957. Although rumours of an Eighth Symphony persisted for many years, and its publication was promised after his death, nothing survives apart from the sketch of the first three bars. Near completion in 1933, it fell victim to his increasingly destructive self-criticism during World War II, probably in 1943.

Sibelius’s achievement in Finland is all the more remarkable in the absence of any vital indigenous musical tradition. Each of his symphonies is entirely fresh in its approach to structure, and it is impossible to foresee from the vantage point of any one the character of the next. His musical personality is the most powerful to have emerged in any of the Scandinavian countries: he is able to establish within a few seconds a sound world that is entirely his own. As in the music of Berlioz, his thematic inspiration and its harmonic clothing were conceived directly in terms of orchestral sound, the substance and the sonority being indivisible one from the other. Above all he possessed a flair for form rare in the 20th century; in him the capacity to allow his material to evolve organically (what one might call ‘continuous creation’, to adapt an image from astronomy) is so highly developed that it has few parallels. His mature symphonies show a continuing refinement of formal resource that (to quote the French critic Marc Vignal) makes him ‘the aristocrat of symphonists’. Vignal was referring to the sophistication of his symphonic means, but late Sibelius is also aristocratic in his unconcern with playing to the gallery and in his concentration on the musical and spiritual vision.

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After a decade of work, Oxford University Press and the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute published the African American National Biography(AANB). The AANB is the largest repository of black life stories ever assembled with more than 4,000 biographies. To celebrate this monumental achievement we have invited the contributors to this 8 volume set to share some of their knowledge with the OUPBlog. Over the next couple of months we will have the honor of sharing their thoughts, reflections and opinions with you.

AANB contributor Anna Christian is the author of Meet It, Greet It, and Defeat It! and Mrs. Griffin is Missing and Other Stories. Her children’s book The Big Table will be published this year.

Practically every young girl in Harlem in the 1950’s knew about Katherine Dunham and her dance studio. Though we’d never met her, we felt she was a member of our family. We loved to dance and she was our role model. Prancing around our Harlem apartment, my sister and I imitated her uninhibited style.

Katherine Dunham was a dancer, choreographer, anthropologist, author, and unofficial ambassador to countries around the world. Former President Jean Bertrand Aristide called her the “Spiritual Mother of Haiti” and her dance pedagogy known as the Dunham Technique is taught in modern dance schools today.

Born in Glen Ellyn, Illinois on June 22, 1909, Dunham didn’t begin formal dance training until her late teens. In 1928, after moving to Chicago with her brother Albert Jr., Dunham began taking classes at the University of Chicago, and studying dance with Madame Ludmila Speranzeva. While at the university, she attended lectures on cultural anthropology presented by A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Edward Sapir, and Bronislaw Malinowski. She studied under anthropologist Robert Redfield who introduced her to the African dance tradition. Dunham researched popular dances of the day such as the Cake Walk, the Lindy Hop, and the Black Bottom. She also took dance classes and performed in several productions at the Cube Theater, a local playhouse in Chicago where she met choreographer Ruth Page and ballet dancer Mark Turbyfill, both members of the Chicago Opera Company. The three opened a dance studio called the “Ballet Negre.”

From 1935-1936, she was awarded travel fellowships from Julius Rosenwald and the Guggenheim Foundation to conduct ethnographic study of dance forms of the Caribbean Vodun of Haiti. Her graduate thesis was entitled “Dances of Haiti, their social Organization, Classification, Form and Function.”

In 1938, she was appointed dance director for the Negro Federal Theatre Project, and the next year, she became the dance director of the Labor Stage of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union for the production of “Pins and Needles.”

On July 10, 1939, Dunham married John Thomas Pratt, a renowned costume and theatrical set designer who became her manager and managed her career for forty-seven years until his death in 1986. They adopted a daughter, Marie Christine Dunham Pratt.

She appeared as Georgia Brown in the Broadway production of “Cabin in the Sky.” In 1941 her first performance in a short film “Carnival of Rhythm” was the first Hollywood dance filmed in color. Her other films include “Star Spangled Rhythm” 1941 with Abbott and Costello; “Pardon My Sarong,” and the breakthrough 1943 black musical “Stormy Weather” with Lena Horne, Bill Robinson, and Cab Calloway.

Dunham began The Katherine Dunham Company, a troupe of dancers, singers, actors, and musicians which was the first African American modern dance company. For thirty years, the troupe was self-subsidized supporting itself by performing in nightclubs, films, and on Dunham’s writing. In 1944, the revue was banned in Boston after one performance of “Rites of Passage” which depicted puberty rituals. Throughout her career, Dunham and her troupe performed in fifty-seven countries in Europe, North Africa, South America, Australia, and the Far East.

In 1945, Dunham opened and directed the Katherine Dunham School of Dance. Eartha Kitt and Marlon Brando were among the school’s alumni. Others who attended were James Dean, Jose Ferrer, Jennifer Jones and Warren Beatty. The company was dissolved when in 1965, President Johnson nominated her to be technical cultural adviser to the Senegalese government to help train the Senegalese National Ballet and assist President Leopold Senghor with the first Pan African World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar.

Dunham lived for several months in Jamaica where she wrote Journey to Accompong. 1946, and traveled to Martinique, Trinidad and Tobago and wrote numerous articles on her observations. She investigated voodoo rituals in Haiti and became a mambo priestess. In 1969 she wrote Island Possessed which explored African religions and rituals adapted to the New World. Also in 1969, she lived a year in Kyoto, Japan where she wrote her autobiography A Touch of Innocence. Dunham wrote articles on anthropology under the pen name of Kaye Dunn and lectured at Yale and the Royal Anthropological Societies in London and Paris.

Because of discrimination she and her troupe encounter in their travels around the U.S. and several countries of the world, she used her influence to protests the treatment of all people of color. In places in the South she refused to perform before segregated audiences. She fought against segregation in hotels, restaurants, and theaters. She turned down a lucrative contract with a Hollywood studio when they requested she replace some of her dark-skinned dancers with lighter skinned ones. While the State Department did not fund her travels, they took credit for the praise she received when performing in other countries.

In the early 1990’s Dunham moved to East St. Louis, Illinois and opened the Performing Arts Training Center, a school designed to offer inner city youth an alternative to the everyday violence occurring in their devastated neighborhoods. In 1992 at age 82, to protest treatment of Haitian refugees, she went on a forty-seven day hunger which was broken only after appeals from several prominent figures including the President of Haiti, Jean Bertrand Aristide.

Dunham died on May 21, 2006. She will also be remembered as the “Matriarch of black dance” for her unique style of dance and the blending of cultural anthropology with dance.

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We in OUP UK are all very excited about the new edition of The Oxford Guide to Literary Britain and Ireland, edited by Daniel Hahn and Nicholas Robins, which publishes here today. In the odd spare moment (not that we publicists get many of those!) we have all been looking up references to places we have lived in, or have been to, and we’ve not been disappointed. With patriotic Scottish pleasure, then, I bring you this extract from the book, written by Christopher MacLachlan, which discusses Sir Walter Scott and Scotland.

Scott is usually acknowledged as the father of the historical novel but he might be called the father of the geographical novel too. The Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe use extended descriptions of scenery but the effect is undermined by the knowledge that she never visited the countries where her fiction is set. Not so with Scott, who repeatedly assures the reader that his places are real, and he has seen them himself. To the thirtieth chapter of Rob Roy (1817), when the hero emerges from his miserable sleeping quarters to view Aberfoil (as Scott spells it) after his first night in the Scottish Highlands, Scott attached a note that ‘the Clachan of Aberfoil now affords a very comfortable little inn’ and that the reader ‘will find himself in the vicinity of the Rev Dr Patrick Grahame… whose urbanity in communicating information on the subject of national antiquities, is scarce exceeded even by the stores of legendary lore which he has accumulated’. But in a later edition Scott added an update: ‘The respectable clergyman alluded to has been dead for some years.’ The reader cannot fail to infer that Scott has personally visited the scene he describes in the novel, and such assurances are scattered through the rest of his work, especially that set in Scotland.

Scott was born in Edinburgh and there, in what he called ‘mine own romantic town,’ he go his education and his profession. In his earliest years, however, he contracted the illness that left him permanently lame and, to recover, was dent to his grandparents’ farm at Sandyknowe, the Borders near Smailholm and its ancient tower-house. There he learnt, mainly from his grandmother, the legends of the Scott family and became enthused by the romance of the Border reivers and the violence and supernatural of the ballads, which he would go on to collect in his first major publication, The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-3). Though he became Clerk to the Court of Session in Edinburgh, his vacations were spent on forays into the Borders and the Highlands, in quest of folklore and history, and he managed to combine his profession with his heritage by becoming Sheriff-depute of Selkirkshire in 1799.

No wonder then that his first major poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), is woven around the Borders landscape, with copious use of place names and central use of the ruins of Melrose Abbey in a scene both topographical and Gothic. Scott foreshadows his later novels in the combination of a journey through accurately described countryside, decorated with local allusions and anecdotes, and striking use of individual locations, to whose fame he adds the literary colouring of his romantic imagination. The effect on the public was strong and lasting. The Lady of the Lake (1810) so enthralled readers with its vision of the Trossachs that they soon became the tourist attraction they remain to this day, with steamer trips on Loch Katrine past Ellen’s Isle, named after the poem’s heroine. Scotland became through Scott the ‘land of the mountain and the flood’ he eulogizes as ‘meet nurse for a poetic child’ in Marmion (1808).

When, in 1814, feeling the rising power of Byron, Scott turned from verse to prose and published Waverley (1814), he began the series of over 30 novels, most set in Scotland, that carry on the combination of fiction and geography found in his poems. Waverley, a novel of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion, presents the principal factions involved not just as historical forces but also as geographical ones. The hero’s introduction to the Highlands is via the Lowlands and the contrast between them. His journey goes back in time but also through different cultures. Scott is heir to Enlightenment views of the progress of society through key stages. Behind the tartan and claymores he indicates the problem facing Fergus MacIvor, his Highland chief, of maintaining a populous clan in a land where resources are scarce and traditionally supplemented by cattle-rustling and blackmail that the modern British state will not longer tolerate. Scott’s sense of place can be full of nostalgia, with his commemoration of past events and his notes on relics and ruins, but the converse is that his is not a static but a dynamic vision. Places are as subject to change as the people who live there.

The economic sinews of Scott’s anatomy of Scotland are perhaps most evident in Rob Roy, where again a young Englishman ventures into remote glens, this time just before the 1715 rebellion, and with a loquacious guide, the Glasgow merchant Bailie Nicol Jarvie. While Frank Osbaldistone, with his poetical pretensions, gives way to somewhat anachronistic feelings of the sublime and the beautiful, Mr Jarvie reminds the reader of the economic facts of life behind the clan turmoils they find themselves in. When, near the end of their adventures, they down Loch Lomond, Frank muses that he ‘could have consented to live and die a lonely hermit in one of the romantic and beautiful islands amongst which our boat glided’, but simultaneously the Bailie is speculating on draining the lake for farming, leaving just enough water for the passage of coal barges.

The ‘Waverley’ novels cover the length and breadth of Scotland, from the Solway Firth in Redgauntlet (1824) to Shetland in The Pirate (1821), from Inveraray in A Legend of Montrose (1819) to the places in the titles of The Fair Maid of Perth (1828) and The Bride of Lammermoor (1818). It is as though Scott followed a programme of novelizing in turn every major region of Scotland. Modern detractors have tried to ridicule the result by naming it ‘Scottland’, a land of makebelieve, but there is truth even in derision and Scott’s image of his native land is still a powerful part of the Scottish scene. Certainly his successors – Stevenson, Buchan, Neil Munro and regional novelists like Lewis Crassic Gibbon and Neil Gunn – often seem to be left colouring in the few blank spaces left in the map of Scotland that Sir Walter drew.

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I recently lunched with the publicity director at Kodansha’s US office. In the interest of full disclosure, OUP distributes Kodansha books in the US, so it gives us an excuse to lunch at nice restaurants each season to talk shop. As we whined about the media and dined on the Parisian/Maghreb fare at Barbes on 36th St., our conversation took the inevitable turn to books and authors we were excited about on our respective Spring lists. I confessed I favored working with Ashraf Ghani & Clare Lockhart on their book about fixing failing states in this crazy mixed up world we live in. I confessed that as a young idealist in the 80s I dreamed of changing the world, but Ghani & Lockhart were actually doing it. They were consulting with world leaders of foreign governments and trying to make the world a better place. I confessed that it gave me a rush and chills to think that somehow I was contributing to their great good efforts, that I was living what i had only dreamed of doing as a boy in upstate New York.

Jennifer nodded. Then she got a gleam in her eye and she told me all about her fave title on the Spring 2008 Kodansha list, A Geisha’s Journey: My Life As a Kyoto Apprentice. It was a book about young Japanese girl who sets out to master the ancient art of being geisha. I was fascinated as Jennifer spoke about young Ruriko’s transformation from a 15 year old school girl into the adult geisha, Komomo.

Komomo is appearing in NYC this week and a brief interview with Komomo appears below.

Event Notes:

On Friday, May 23 at 1 p.m. there will be a signing and permformance at Kinokuniyya (Bryant Park Store), 1073 Avenue of the Americas.

At 3:30 there will also be an informal signing and performance at the Ippodo Gallery, 521 W. 26th Street.

On Saturday, May 24 at 3 p.m., Komomo will be appearing at Kiteya Soho, 464 Broome St., New York, NY (near Greene St.). She will be autographing books and performing.

Komomo will also teach a two-day geisha workshop at the Japan Society on May 21 and 22. She will participate in a lecture featuring Ogino on May 22. (Sorry! This is sold-out).

OUPblog: In the book, you expressed some uncertainty before you became a geisha. What doubts were going through your mind?

Komomo: I wasn’t sure if I was ready to become a full geisha because they are required to entertain the customers with their “skills in the arts” much more than an apprentice. Also, I thought that perhaps I should experience the outside world at that time because I thought I might miss opportunities.

OUP: “Geisha Experience Tours” – in which everyday women are dressed as apprentices and are professionally photographed in popular sites throughout Kytoto – have become very popular lately. Do you feel that these tourist excursions have commercialized or tarnished the image of the geisha profession?

Komomo: I think so. If everyday women walk in the city in geisha costume, I want them to somehow indicate that they are not professional geisha.

OUP: You lost many freedoms when you made the decision to become a geisha. How difficult was that for a teenager to live under such restrictions?

Komomo: I once thought about quitting the apprenticeship without becoming a geisha because I wanted to be free and to choose whatever I wanted to do in the outside world – I wanted to go to university, study abroad, etc.

However, as I mulled it over and over, I realized I hadn’t achieved anything that I could be proud of. Whatever path I decided to take, I thought I would need to have some kind of expertise to contribute – otherwise no one would take me seriously. I decided to continue my work in the hanamachi (geisha district) because I thought, even if I had freedom, it wouldn’t do me any good until I achieved something and found something to be proud of. At that time, though, I felt like I was in limbo – like I still had a lot to accomplish.

OUP: Is there anything you miss about the outside world or anything that you regret you’re missing?

Komomo: I think it’s never too late to start anything. If there is something that I want to do, I will do it. There is nothing that I regret.

OUP: What do you do in your free time?

Komomo: Once in a while, when I get free time, I usually dine out and go shopping with my friends.

OUP: What does the future hold for you? Do you still have the option of marrying and having a family while being a geisha?

Komomo: I believe that being a geisha is a lifelong profession—we can continue to work as a geisha regardless of age. However, in today’s hanamachi in Kyoto, geisha usually quit their jobs when they decide to get married. This might change in the future, though. Unlike the old days, geisha don’t have a danna (a rich man who acts as a geisha’s individual patron), therefore, if we want to continue working as a geisha, getting married might become an obstacle.

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It may be called the International Polar Year, but it actually runs for two years. This time it is March 2007 to March 2009, so we’ll shortly be right in the middle of it. The IPY involves over 200 projects in the Arctic and Antarctic, with thousands of scientists from over 60 nations examining a wide range of physical, biological and social research topics. I was reading about this recently, and saw that the BBC website is running its own Antarctic Diary to coincide with the IPY. This put me in mind of OUP’s edition of Robert Falcon Scott’s Journals, edited by Max Jones, so I thought today I would bring you an excerpt from the last chapter: The Last March.

Friday, March 2.––Lunch. Misfortunes rarely come singly. We marched to the (Middle Barrier) depôt fairly easily yesterday afternoon, and since that have suffered three distinct blows which have placed us in a bad position. First we found a shortage of oil; with most rigid economy it can scarce carry us to the next depôt on this surface (71 miles away). Second, Titus Oates disclosed his feet, the toes showing very bad indeed, evidently bitten by the late temperatures. The third blow came in the night, when the wind, which we had hailed with some joy, brought dark overcast weather. It fell below -40˚ in the night, and this morning it took 1½ hours to get our foot gear on, but we got away before eight. We lost cairn and tracks together and made as steady as we could N. by W., but have seen nothing. Worse was to come––the surface is simply awful. In spite of strong wind and full sail we have only done 5½ miles. We are in a very queer street since there is no doubt we cannot do the extra marches and feel the cold horribly.

Saturday, March 3.––Lunch. We picked up the track again yesterday, finding ourselves to the eastward. Did close on 10 miles and things looked a trifle better; but this morning the outlook is blacker than ever. Started well and with good breeze; for an hour made good headway; then the surface grew awful beyond words. The wind drew forward; every circumstance was against us. After 4¼ hours things so bad that we camped, having covered 4½ miles. (R. 46.) One cannot consider this a fault of our own––certainly we were pulling hard this morning––it was more than three parts surface which held us back––the wind at strongest, powerless to move the sledge. When the light is good it is easy to see the reason. The surface, lately a very good hard one, is coated with a thin layer of woolly crystals, formed by radiation no doubt. These are too firmly fixed to be removed by the wind and cause impossible friction on the runners. God help us, we can’t keep up this pulling, that is certain. Amongst ourselves we are unendingly cheerful, but what each man feels in his heart I can only guess. Pulling on foot gear in the morning is getting slower and slower, therefore every day more dangerous.

Sunday, March 4.––Lunch. Things looking very black indeed. As usual we forgot our trouble last night, got into our bags, slept splendidly on good hoosh, woke and had another, and started marching. Sun shining brightly, tracks clear, but surface covered with sandy frost-rime. All the morning we had to pull with all our strength, and in 4½ hours we covered 3½ miles. Last night it was overcast and thick, surface bad; this morning sun shining and surface as bad as ever. One has little to hope for except perhaps strong dry wind––an unlikely contingency at this time of year. Under the immediate surface crystals is a hard sastrugi surface, which must have been excellent for pulling a week or two ago. We are about 42 miles from the next depôt and have a week’s food, but only about 3 to 4 days’ fuel––we are as economical of the latter as one can possibly be, and we cannot afford to save food and pull as we are pulling. We are in a very tight place indeed, but none of us despondent yet, or at least we preserve every semblance of good cheer, but one’s heart sinks as the sledge stops dead at some sastrugi behind which the surface sand lies thickly heaped. For the moment the temperature is on the -20˚––an improvement which makes us much more comfortable, but a colder snap is bound to come again soon. I fear that Oates at least will weather such an event very poorly. Providence to our aid! We can expect little from man now except the possibility of extra food at the next depôt. It will be real bad if we get there and find the same shortage of oil. Shall we get there? Such a short distance it would have appeared to us on the summit! I don’t know what I should do if Wilson and Bowers weren’t so determinedly cheerful over things.

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A great excitement swirled around the garden reception for W.E.B Du Bois in the grounds of the royal governor of Jamaica’s official residence. On 3 May 1915, the island’s representative men assembled to honor the Harvard-educated African American, feted by the local papers as a scholar who certainly ‘belonged to the aristocracy of intellect in America’. A stocky dark-skinned black man was one of the last in line to extend a proud hand of welcome. Du Bois later recalled his ‘remarkable intensity’ but other than that, little impression was made on him by the man who was destined, over the next decade, to become his nemesis: Marcus Garvey.

Garvey was delighted to count himself among the chosen to be presented to such an eminent, noble-headed figure. At the time, Du Bois’s titles included “editor of the prestigious Crisis magazine” and “founding member of the NAACP” – an organisation backed by wealthy philanthropists, which boasted a membership of several hundred thousand. Garvey, by contrast, could count on a fluctuating membership of about fifty friends and associates who were requested to bring along their own chairs to meetings. Du Bois, then, was a long established race leader, whilst Garvey dreamed of becoming one.

On the surface, they would appear to have been natural allies, most notably in their love of learning. Garvey was largely self-educated; he’d managed to scrape together enough time and money to take some lessons in law at Birkbeck College in London. Modesty, though, was not one of his virtues. Later in his career, when advertising his talks, he often billed himself “Professor Garvey, late of London University.” Where Du Bois could show admirers his framed, embossed university qualifications, Garvey, with his love of parade and pageantry could only display his gowns. For all of his public ostentation, privately Garvey, like Du Bois, was a man of conservative, Victorian taste. Both men saw the arts and culture as tools for edification. When Du Bois wrote that Claude McKay’s highly peppered tale of fecund Negro life, Home to Harlem left him feeling like he ‘needed to take a bath’; Garvey similarly complained that McKay’s work as ‘damnable libel against the Negro’; for both men, art was to be put in the service of the race. They also shared a fierce hatred of the injustice meted out to black people – views which they espoused in their journals; and it seemed both, very quickly, were convinced that the other was the very worst type of Negro.

One of the key difficulties for the future rivals, when they squared up to each other a few years later, was that the cursory handshake on the governor’s lawns was the closest contact they would ever achieve. Soon after arriving in New York in 1916, Garvey planned to launch himself onto the public, giving his first lecture at St.Mark’s Church in Harlem. Unheralded and unknown, he had no entrée into African American circles but he did possess a great store of confidence and chutzpah; the twenty-nine year old Jamaican set his sights on wooing arguably the greatest African American leader of the time (a would-be mentor, old enough to be his father): W.E.B Du Bois.

Like so many hopeful supplicants to the court of Du Bois, the young Jamaican immigrant made his way downtown to the offices of the Crisis, next door to the NAACP. Du Bois was out of town, and the Jamaican caller had to settle for leaving a short, deferential note inviting the celebrated editor ‘to be so kind as to take the “chair”’ at his first public lecture. Later Garvey would recall how his disappointment was offset by the peculiarity of what he had witnessed in the NAACP offices: the stark absence of coloured staff among the officers of a supposedly coloured organisation. He claimed to have been perplexed and ‘unable to tell whether I was in a white office or that of the NAACP’. The question of color vexed both men, but entwined and unspoken was also a discomfort over their respective classes. At some level, Du Bois was embarrassed by what he perceived as his rival’s gauche uncouth bombastic nature. Critics of Du Bois would say that he was merely jealous of the younger man’s great powers of oratory and common touch. Whereas Garvey tapped into the dreams and aspirations of the great mass of working class black, the so-called ‘cow-tail and hoe-handle brigade’; Du Bois, primarily and unashamedly, spoke to the ‘talented tenth’ of the race who were going to integrate mainstream society and achieve, in David Levering Lewis’s memorable phrase, ‘civil rights by copyright’. Again though, Garvey would not have disagreed with the assertion that black men and women were just as capable of erudition as their white counterparts.

Perhaps the conflict between them came down to style and presentation. ‘Meeting Du Bois was something of a personal disappointment,’ Claude McKay observed, ‘he seemed possessed of a cold, acid hauteur of spirit, which is not lessened even when he vouchsafes a smile.’ This stiffness did not compare favourably alongside the Ciceronian orator, Marcus Garvey, whose audience marvelled at the ‘music of his mouth.’

Garvey’s career in America took off quickly in the space of a couple of years. And Du Bois looked on in dismay at the calibre of people who began to make their way to Liberty Hall, to savour something of the energy, excitement and theatrics of the ecstatic meetings. It must have been galling for a man (Du Bois) who believed himself the great advocate of the race to see his supremacy so dangerously challenged.

In 1920, when Garvey led 25,000 of his supporters from Harlem to Madison Square Garden to witness his coronation as ‘provisional president of Africa’, Du Bois was apparently spotted in amongst the crowds, squirming in his seat. When Du Bois was interviewed about the ‘purple-robed champion of Africa’, he could barely disguise his alarm: ‘It may be that Garvey’s movement will succeed. I shan’t raise a hand to stop it.’

In fact, quietly and behind the scenes, Du Bois was doing everything within his power to derail the movement. With forensic gusto, he laid before the readers of the Crisis the inept financial shenanigans of Garvey’s failing shipping enterprise, the Black Star Line; Du Bois also believed the fantasy of the back-to-Africa movement had to be checked; and, exploiting his good relations with the Liberian authorities, encouraged President King to spell out in the pages of the Crisis his antipathy to Garvey’s romantic and flawed dream of a new African empire.

Du Bois would argue that many of Garvey’s setbacks were self-inflicted – none more so than his little understood negotiations with the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. That one act spelled the death knell for the Garvey movement in America and released Du Bois from any sense of cordiality and restraint. Garvey was, intoned Du Bois ‘either a lunatic or a traitor.’ By the time of that extinguishing editorial, both race leaders had descended into a furnace of hate. If Du Bois considered Garvey a dangerous and embarrassing demagogue, then Garvey was equally clear about his rivals motives; Du Bois was the ‘unfortunate mulatto who bewails every drop of Negro blood in his veins’.

Perhaps hatred is easier to maintain in the abstract. Physical distance was undeniably a factor. Garvey had established himself in the heart of the pulsating, vibrating, dirt and detritus of Harlem; whilst Du Bois luxuriated in the comforts of mid Manhattan. If they had managed to reach out to each other, then the two men with superabundant energy and race pride would surely have been a force for good.

Almost a decade after that first introduction in Jamaica, their paths crossed briefly at a hotel in Cincinnati. Du Bois, joined by Wendell Phillips Dabney, was waiting by the elevator in the foyer when the doors opened and ‘stout dark gentleman, gorgeously apparelled in military costume’ stepped out. ‘Ye Gods,’ exclaimed Dabney in a later account, ‘’Twas Garvey. He saw me, a smile of recognition, then a glance at Du Bois. His eyes flew wide open. Stepping aside, he stared; turning around, he stared, while Du Bois, looking straight forward, head uplifted, and nostrils quivering, marched into the elevator.’ The two men never spoke. The doors closed comfortably and the editor of the Crisis ascended. ‘Du Bois & Garvey Meet!’ Screamed the headlines of the Cincinnati Union the next day, ‘No Blood Is Shed!

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Mark McNeilly is the author of George Washington and the Art of Business: Leadership Principles of America’s First Commander-in-Chief as well as Sun Tzu and the Art of Business: Six Strategic Principles for Managers. On Monday he helped us celebrate President’s Day. Today he takes a closer look at George Washington on the anniversary of his birth. The views he expresses are his alone and are not meant to represent those of any company or institution with which he is affiliated.

We celebrated President’s Day on Monday but George Washington’s actual birthday is today, February 22nd. While many of us enjoyed the slew of Presidents’ Day Sales, what we may have lost is reflection on who this great man was and the impact he has had on our country. And for many who do think of him, he is not a man of history but a man of myth. For example, when talking with a friend of mine about Washington she said, “He’s sort of a fable, kind of like Paul Bunyan.” For some he is not even that. In one recent study of college students’ knowledge of American civics only 68% of freshman knew Washington’s proper role as general and statesman in the founding of our country. The rest (roughly one third of the students) thought he was a constitutional writer, a social compact theorist, advocate for states rights or the leader of the Massachusetts’ delegation to the Constitutional Convention.

Those who know history well understand that Washington’s accomplishments are in a class of their own. His journey began at a young age, when he started by building his character. At age 16 Washington sat down to copy advice from the “Rules for Behavior in Company and Conversation”. It was a list of one hundred ten rules, many of which might seem quaint today, such as “Be no Flatterer”. Yet this type of moral education helped instill in Washington a sense of propriety and integrity which would form his character.

In addition to being a gentleman Washington was of great stature; he stood roughly six feet two inches tall, had broad shoulders with a narrow waist, and weighed about 200 pounds. He was very strong and was thought by many was as one of the greatest horsemen of his time. Later in life Washington would build on these traits by wearing well-tailored military uniforms to enhance his image as a great leader.

As a teen Washington started out as a surveyor in the Virginia wilderness. He soon learned both the rigors and promise of the new country. His knowledge led to him being selected by Virginia’s lieutenant governor to send a message to the French telling them to retreat from British territory. Braving the winter snows, icy rivers and hostile Indians, Washington delivered the message and completed his mission. Washington also played a major role in the later conflicts between the British and French in America. During the ambush of Braddock’s expedition near Fort Duquesne Washington had two horses shot from under him and had his coat riddled with bullets. Yet he helped rally the British-American force and assisted in the retreat from danger.

After the shots were fired at Lexington and Concord to begin the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress unanimously elected Washington as commander-in-chief of the American forces. Washington took the existing armed rabble, and with a lot of hard work, turned it into an army. He led it in the struggle for years, overcoming severe defeats to finally win the crowning victory at Yorktown. Most importantly, after winning independence for his country, he surrendered his sword to Congress and returned to his farm. His former nemesis, King George III, was amazed by this return of power by Washington and called him “the greatest character of his age.”
Seeing the flaws in the Articles of Confederation and the need for a stronger union Washington was instrumental in calling the Constitutional Convention. Because of his prestige and wartime leadership he was chosen by the founding fathers to preside over the critical session. Washington helped shepherd the debate past many roadblocks to a successful conclusion, culminating in the development and eventual acceptance of the Constitution.

Called again to service by his country Washington was elected by unanimous vote of the Electoral College to be the first President of the United States. He served two terms and helped the fledgling country navigate the early years of independence. He left the country stronger and on the path to greatness when he left the oval office. Again he returned to Mount Vernon, passing from this world on December 14, 1799.

Thomas Jefferson said of him, “For his was the singular destiny and merit, of leading the armies of his country successfully through an arduous war, for the establishment of its independence; of conducting its councils through the birth of a government, new in its forms and principles, until it had settled down into a quiet and orderly train; and of scrupulously obeying the laws through the whole of his career, civil and military, of which the history of the world furnishes no other example…”

We should be thankful for Washington’s gifts to the nation and honor the memory of this great man.

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One day, Mae West and some friends sat stuck in New York City traffic. In a rush, she ordered her driver to take a shortcut past the waterfront, and as her car rolled past the docks she spied a young woman with a sailor on each arm. West described her as attractive but with “blonde hair, over bleached and all frizzy . . . a lot of make-up on and a tight black satin coat that was all wrinkled and soiled. . . .She had runs in her stockings and she had this little turban on and a big beautiful bird of paradise.” Mae remarked to her companions, “You wonder this dame wouldn’t put half a bird of paradise on her head and the rest of the money into a coat and stockings.” But as her friends speculated that the bird of paradise was probably a seafaring John’s recompense and that this woman of the streets at best made only fifty cents to two dollars a trick, Mae grew enraged. Certainly she was worldly enough to know about prostitution, yet she recalled, “I was really upset about that.” She insisted it disturbed her to witness such exploitation of a woman—and also to realize that a woman could be so ignorant of her potential for exploiting her exploitation.

Mae continued to ponder the waterfront waif. “I kept thinking, ‘Fifty cents! How many guys would she have to have to pay her rent, buy her food?’ ” She claimed she dreamed of the woman that night, awakening the next morning still contemplating her hard luck. “And then I said,” she told Life magazine, “Is it possible? Is this the play I am going to write?” She realized that she had mentally “remade” this scarlet woman, envisioning her on a path that led out of the slums to a better life, a transformation easily achieved on stage. Inspired, she set out to write a new play.

For some time, West had searched for a vehicle for a Broadway comeback. She had spent several years reviewing scripts, rejecting them all as unsatisfactory. But in 1924, about the time she received her waterfront inspiration, a client of Timony’s, John J. Byrne, showed up with a one-act vaudeville skit called “Following the Fleet.” Hearing that West was searching for a scarlet-woman vehicle, something like Somerset Maugham’s Rain, he had composed a story of a Montreal strumpet who makes a living by seducing British sailors. On West’s behalf, Timony purchased Byrne’s sketch for $300. He then charged the writer $ 100 for acting as his agent and pressed him to invest the rest in a real estate deal.

In December 1925, working again with Adeline Leitzbach, West expanded Byrne’s sketch into a three act play that she called The Albatross. In it, she took a prostitute from Montreal’s red light district to the mansions of Westchester County, New York. Energized by her waterfront muse, West claimed ideas spilled forth on paper bags, stationery, envelopes, and old scraps of paper that she forwarded to Timony’s secretaries for transcription.

But Mae’s dedication wavered. To keep her on the task, Timony began locking her in her room, refusing to let her out until she had finished writing. It not only forced her to work but prevented her from seeing other men, demonstrating the great degree of control he maintained over her. Her acceptance of this treatment indicates that the private Mae West had yet to achieve the forcefulness and confidence of her fantasized stage presence.

After The Albatross was drafted, Timony and West set out to find backers. Their first choice was the Shuberts, and she sent them her script under a pseudonym, Jane Mast. She quickly received a curt rejection note. In fact, none of Broadway’s producers, big or small, were interested, so West and Timony decided to raise the money and produce the play themselves. Timony put in a share and later convinced Harry Cohen, a Manhattan clothier, to kick in a loan of almost $4,000. As producer, he recruited C. William Morganstern, the former proprietor of Pittsburgh’s Family Theater, where West had performed in 191 2; his most current endeavor involved producing Broadway’s Love’s Call, one of the biggest disasters of 1924. But funds still fell short, and Tillie, with the help of Owney Madden, supplied the balance. Timony then incorporated their endeavor as the Morals Production Corporation.

Recruiting a director proved difficult. Several candidates turned down the job outright, insisting that the script was too bawdy for legitimate theater. Another prospect demanded extensive revisions. West immediately rejected him. Finally, Timony arranged for a meeting with Edward Eisner, a small-time director whose most recent undertakings had been total flops, one a comedy rated by a reviewer as “monotony.” West presented her script by reading it out loud to him, since he had conveniently forgotten his glasses, and as she finished, she claimed he cried out, “By God! You’ve done it! You’ve got it! This is it!”

Finding a cast was also a challenge, for West was attempting her Broadway comeback in the midst of controversy. For several seasons, the Great White Way had hosted a series of “sex plays,” including Lulu Belle, the story of a mixed-race prostitute who slept her way to Paris, and The Shanghai Gesture, the chronicle of a madam of a Chinese brothel and her rage against men. These productions stirred a call for a cleanup of the city’s stages. As a result, career-minded actors and actresses, fearful of negative backlash, steered ‘clear of Mae West and similar ventures. Beyond this, the Morals Production Corporation’s salaries were not competitive, forcing West to sign up a cast of unknowns. On a tight budget, she used Beverly as her understudy, acted as barber to male cast members, and borrowed old scenery from a former burlesque producer.

Securing a theater proved to be another problem. Booking space on Broadway was costly and competitive; shows had to demonstrate potential profitability. Disappointingly, all the venues in Manhattan’s theater district were either occupied, not interested, or too expensive. Finally, Timony discovered one possibility: Daly’s Sixty-third Street Theater, a small off-Broadway house. Daly’s had a reputation for experimentation; in 1921, it hosted the successful all-black revue Shuffle Along. Even more important, the management agreed to waive normal up-front charges in exchange for 40 percent of the show’s profits.

During rehearsals West’s play took final form. While she already had a completed script, at Eisner’s suggestion she retooled it, urging the cast to improvise and reshape their roles. For her part, she found Eisner a catalyst for the exploration of her full range of talents, making her more aware of her performance’s verbal and nonverbal nuances. As she remembered, he observed, “You have a quality—a strange amusing quality that I have never found in any of these other women. You have a definite sexual quality, gay and unrepressed. It even mocks you personally.” While Eisner may have been a third-rate director, he understood West’s strongest asset, a style that rested in signification and communicated sensuality that was both serious and satirical. With his guidance, she further honed her ability to offer conflicting messages and double meanings.

West’s play continued to evolve until just before the curtain rang up on its first tryout performance in Waterbury, Connecticut. Just hours before opening, she had another inspiration. After listening for weeks to Eisner rave about her “sex quality, a low sex quality,” she had a revelation. She insisted that the manager replace The Albatross on his marquee with a new title — SEX. Her first night in Waterbury produced excellent box office, bringing in several thousand dollars.

Shortly afterward, the company traveled to New London, Connecticut, for more trial performances. Despite the play’s bold new title, the opening night’s audience numbered only eighty-five by curtain time. But, West insisted, the following day’s matinee was a great morale booster. That morning, the U.S. naval fleet arrived in port, and that afternoon sailors, lured by the sign reading SEX, lined up around the block for tickets. Their reception was more than enthusiastic. “Believe me,” West told a reporter later, “I’ll never forget the Navy.”

SEX returned to Manhattan and, promoted with ads reading “SEX with Mae West,” opened at Daly’s Theater on April 26, 1926. The premiere was well attended, but the production still had some rough spots. One actor’s collar kept springing up, a window shade refused to stay rolled down, and a loud bang offstage interrupted one scene. The sound effects for a champagne cork’s pop occurred several conspicuous seconds after the bottle had been opened. But the play’s blunders were minor in comparison to its “frankness.” One reviewer complained, “We were shown not sex but lust—stark naked lust.” Early in the program, several patrons left in disgust, and by the third act, empty seats dotted the theater. Judging by the newspapers, the opening night audience’s reaction was mixed. Some sat quietly stunned, while others roared with laughter, shouting out their approval at choice moments.…

Early on, SEX’s future looked dim. The Morals Production Corporation had little money for a publicity campaign, and within the first week attendance lagged. The reviews were disappointing. The more stodgy New York dailies agreed to downplay SEX’s sensationalism and blast it as inept and amateurish. One of these, the New York Times, branded SEX as “feeble and disjointed,” declaring that Montreal, Trinidad, and Westchester possessed “ample cause for protest.” The New Yorker was far less kind, declaring it a “poor balderdash of street sweepings and cabaret sentimentality unexpurgated in tone.” Variety summed up the reaction of many, proclaiming SEX a “disgrace,” with “nasty, infantile, amateurish and vicious dialogue.” While the play was attributed to the mysterious Jane Mast, no one was fooled. All blamed Mae West for what one reviewer condemned “as bad a play as these inquiring eyes have gazed upon in three seasons.”

But with the help of word of mouth and several lurid reviews in the city’s tabloids, curiosity began to draw New Yorkers to Daly’s little off-Broadway theater. Before long, more and more came. When writer Robert Benchley attended, he noted that “at the corner of Central Park West and Sixty-Third Street we ran into a line of people which seemed to be extending in the general direction of Daly’s Theatre . . . and what was more, the people standing in line were clutching, not complimentary passes, but good, green dollar bills.” Within a few weeks, SEX was a hit, seats in the house went for top dollar, and it began to turn a nice profit. While it slipped during the hot summer, its low overhead helped SEX generate strong returns for the rest of the year.

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This clip, featuring Billie Holiday and Lester Young, dates from 1957. It was the last time they made music together and possibly the last time they ever met. Within two years both would be dead, their names forever linked by their unique relationship and the beauty of the music they created together.

They first met in 1934, at a Harlem after-hours club, when she was 19 and he was 25. Billie had been singing professionally for less than two years and was virtually unknown outside Harlem. Lester was passing briefly and unhappily through the ranks of Fletcher Henderson’s band. On that night Billie sang, Lester played alongside her and an instant empathy was forged. It was as if they could think each other’s thoughts and feel each other’s emotions - a single mind with two voices. The records they made together, beginning in 1937, are filled with tiny moments of pure joy, surprise, and the casual grace of youth.

Their personal relationship was equally remarkable. They were not, as their friend, the trumpeter Buck Clayton, delicately put it, ‘romantically inclined’. Billie went for tough, dominant men, and Lester was the exact opposite - timid, shy and complicated. Nevertheless they found endless delight in one another’s company. It was Billie who gave Lester the name ‘Prez’ - short for ’The President’ - and he in turn named her ‘Lady Day’. The names followed them to the grave, and indeed beyond.

Everyone knew about this extraordinary platonic relationship, but nobody could quite figure it out. The simplest explanation would be that at least one of them was gay, and since it clearly wasn’t Billie, it must be the mild-mannered, soft-spoken Lester. In fact Lester wasn’t gay, merely discreet about his private life. When the gay rumour finally reached him his comment was typically cool: ‘I never even auditioned,’ he said.

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OUP: So how long have you been teaching writing in African American Studies?

Dr. Gates: I started my career teaching at Yale as a lecturer in 1976. So I’ve been teaching—how many years is that? 31 years. I’ve been teaching African and African American Literature since then and I’ve enjoyed every day of it.

Some people are lucky enough to be able engage in a career that’s both a vocation and an avocation, and I’m one of those people. Being a scholar of the African American tradition is somewhat analogous to being a Talmudic scholar—a secular Talmudic scholar, as it were, someone who resurrects the texts of his or her tradition and then explicates them. Publishing encyclopedias and concordances and dictionaries about the Black tradition codifies it. That way we can break the cycle which has cursed every previous generation of scholars of African Studies and African American Studies, which is, you might think of it as reinventing the wheel. There wasn’t a bibliographical memory.

OUP: Sure, of course.

Dr. Gates: The latest development is the phenomenally important, AFRICAN AMERICAN NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY Project with its 4,000 biographical entries. This means that anyone anywhere can access all this information about the Black community and the Black experience and it will never be lost again. You know I feel that my career has been worthwhile.

OUP: What are the biggest ways the field has changed since you began?

Dr. Gates: Well let me give you the three changes….First, we have more and more scholars teaching in African and African American Studies than we have before. Secondly, there are more and stronger departments with the right to grant tenure and the right to give a PhD at the major research universities in the United States, by which I mean Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, etc. This is a huge difference. And then third, we have more books published about African and African American Studies, both bibliographical and critical, since 1980, certainly than published in the history of Black people writing in the English language.

OUP: So it seems like what you’re saying is, in a way, the creation of these sort of monumental works has sort of helped create the field of African American Studies.

Dr. Gates: We’ve had an extraordinary burst of scholarship. And very subtle and sophisticated scholarship. Much of the early work on African Americans was ideologically driven, either positively or negatively, by “friends of the Negro” (quote unquote)—meaning abolitionists or neo-abolitionists—or by enemies of the Negro, apologists for slavery and Jim Crowe. So there has never been a better time to be a scholar or student of African and/or African American Studies.

OUP: Tell me, if you can, how do you think the AFRICAN AMERICAN NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY fits into this development of the field?

Dr. Gates: The AANB has just risen to the third power, or cubed, reference accessibility in our field. The metaphor that Maya Angelou uses is standing on the shoulders of our ancestors. That means that now we can take African American Studies to a whole new level. Because we don’t have to waste time—in terms of the subtlety of our analysis—because we don’t have to waste time reinventing the bibliographical wheel. We don’t have to waste time wondering who has written about Phyllis Wheatley or Frederick Douglas.

OUP: And then you can build on the information that has been recorded.

Dr. Gates: And you can build on it, yes. It is a tremendous—the contribution to efficiency is difficult even to calculate. And I think that—you know I’m biased— publishing the AFRICAN AMERICAN NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY will just be an enormous boon to scholarship in both these fields. You know now there are so many people we don’t know—even the most sophisticated scholar of African American history, for example, just simply doesn’t know about the vast number of players who were significant in African American history. The best biographical dictionary contains about 630 entries, and we’re about to publish 4,000 in print and then thousands more online. That’s amazing. I mean, you just can’t even grasp it.

OUP: In a way, we are potentially rescuing some figures that might have fallen by the wayside.

Dr. Gates: We are rescuing significant historical figures from the purgatory of ignorance. And doing so, we will revolutionize our field. So without a doubt the publication of AFRICAN AMERICAN NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY is the single most important event—archival event—in the history of African American Studies.

OUP: Would you say has any aspect of this work been surprising to you?

Dr. Gates: Oh, it’s full of surprises. These are people who thrived, were important in their time and have disappeared. They’ve fallen through the cracks. And the fact that we can then bring them back to life—you know, restore them to their historical significance—gives me more pleasure than I can put into words. It’s like these are the Lazarus’s of the Black tradition. And they are being brought back to life by the wonders of technology.

OUP: Technology and a lot of hard work.

Dr. Gates: And a lot of hard work. We have a great team of editors, our editorial board, and researchers and we’re all working together; it’s truly a collective project.

OUP: Certainly. And I think that’s probably why I think it’s going to be successful.

Dr. Gates: Yeah, I think so. You know, I feel that I’m blessed to have started my career when I did, under the tutelage of John Blassingame, and then been able to see these remarkably dramatic changes, and be part of—to utilize the changes in technology for the greater benefit of scholars of African and African American Studies. And, to some degree, to contribute to those changes, as well. I’m like a kid in a candy store.

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