Stephen Wade’s forthcoming book The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience will be published in September 2012. Visit Stephen’s information page for details on his new CD and upcoming concert dates.

A beloved teacher, he was also a passionate scholar whose work will endure.

A full obituary can be read at this site.

“The most enjoyable moment in A People’s History of Baseball comes when Mitchell Nathanson recalls US Representative Newt Gingrich’s strategy for ending the lockout that threatened the 1994 Major League Baseball season. The soon-to-be House speaker suggested that if both sides watched Field of Dreams together, their differences would be forgotten. As Nathanson concludes, ‘[T]he film offered up mythology as history, something Gingrich himself endorsed.’. . . A People’s History of Baseball provides vigorous and fascinating challenges to the ways in which fans have related to a game that he says has been ‘virtually synonymous’ with America for well over a century.”

Archie Green celebrates one of the most revered folklorists and labor historians of the twentieth century and captures the many dimensions of Green’s remarkably influential life and work.

Sean Burns is a teacher, musician, and gardener. His research and teaching interests center on the history, culture, and politics of progressive social movements. His band, Professor Burns and the Lilac Field, is rooted in Berkeley, California.

Janine will participate in the Printers Row Lit Fest June 9 in Chicago and has scheduled other personal appearances to discuss and sign copies of the book. Today, the Chicago Tribune included some of Janine’s advice for shopping at farmers’ markets in Monica Eng’s piece Best of the season: The freshest tips to get the most out of your farmers market trips.

Christopher Robert Reed received a Superior Achievement Award for his book, The Rise of Chicago’s Black Metropolis, 1920-1929, as did Gerald A. Danzer for his book, Illinois: A History in Pictures.

Congratulations to all.

Q:  Why did you choose the United Presbyterian Orphan’s Home and the Home for Colored Children as the focus of your book?

Ramey:  I launched this project hoping to learn more about African-American child welfare efforts, about which we really know very little. When I found the Home for Colored Children – and then discovered its white “sister” orphanage, started by the very same person – I knew that I was onto a story. The two organizations are still around today, now serving troubled teens, and key for me as a historian, both still had their records. These are amazing collections that allowed me to do an in-depth comparative analysis of black and white childcare at the turn of the last century. The book is a case study of these two orphanages that reflect the larger, national story of race, gender, and class relationships underlying the development of our child welfare systems.

Q:  The phrase “Child Care” is in the title of your book and the word “Orphanages” is in the subtitle.  Were the children’s homes run like traditional orphanages or more similar to present-day daycare systems?

Ramey:  When these two orphanages were founded in 1878 and 1880, working parents had very few options if they needed help taking care of their children. There were “day nurseries,” one of the ancestors of modern daycare, but if they didn’t have friends and
family they could count on, parents were far more likely to turn to orphanages for their childcare needs. The book is really the story of how working parents – often widows or widowers in a crisis – strategically used the institutions as a temporary means of childcare while they re-stabilized their families. In this sense, I am reconceptualizing orphanages as childcare and locating the historical roots of modern daycare.

Q: How did race influence the differences between these two institutions?

Ramey:  Race played a key role in the development of these institutions. Understanding race as a relationship of power helps us to see the ways in which the (mostly) white
founders of both orphanages envisioned their work and interacted with parents, children, donors, reformers, and the broader community. Quantitative analysis of the records of over 1,500 children also allows me to precisely show the different ways in which black and white families used the orphanages, from children’s length of stay, to sibling placement patterns, use of foster homes, and dismissal outcomes. In nearly every quantifiable way, the data suggest how much more vulnerable African American families were to the ravages of modern industrial capitalism. But the data also reveal incredible family strength and
resilience.

Q:  What were some of the jobs of the parents who used these homes?

Ramey:  The mothers and fathers who placed their children in these orphanages were typically working class – not necessarily impoverished, but working hard to make ends meet. But it didn’t take much to tip a family into crisis, and many families faced overlapping crises: the death of a spouse, ill health, lack of adequate housing, the loss of a job, and so on. Race and gender affected employment options, with African-American women relegated largely to domestic positions and African-American men struggling at the bottom rungs of the industrial economy. White men’s employment ranged from laborers and farm hands to more skilled positions in the mills and occupations such as coopers, tinsmiths, and shopkeepers.

Q:  How long on average would children stay there?

Ramey:  Race and gender (of both the parent and child) also affected how long children stayed in the orphanages. On average, white parents were able to retrieve their children
after about a year. It generally took African-American parents just over two years before reuniting with their children. In the end, the majority of children went back home to their families.

Q:  Who were the people that ran these institutions?

Ramey:  The Rev. James Fulton founded the two orphanages, with significant contributions from his wife, Mary Fulton, and a number of other women. The institutions were actually run by two separate Christian women’s groups: the United Presbyterian Women’s Association of North America (UPWANA) managed the United Presbyterian Orphan’s Home and the Women’s Christian Association (WCA) managed the Home for Colored Children. The WCA was the foremother of the YWCA movement in Pittsburgh.
Surprisingly, the board of directors at both orphanages included working-class women. And the Home for Colored Children board included African-American women from its very inception, making it an early example of interracial cooperation in the field of social welfare. These women worked extremely hard and were intimately involved in the day-to-day operations of the institutions, some putting in what we would consider full-time hours.

Q:  How many children would be in the homes, at any given time?

Ramey:  The orphanages were nearly always brimming with children, often 50, 60 or more. In the early years, this meant several children would be sharing a single bed. The
institutions had long waiting lists and often had to turn families away or force them to wait months before admitting their children.

Q:  Who are the people in the image on the book’s cover?

Ramey:  In one of the most remarkable moments during my research, I discovered that my great-great grandfather, James Caldwell, had placed his children in the United Presbyterian Orphan’s Home after his wife, Jessie, died in childbirth. Knowing the outcome of that particular story gave me insight into how families were using these
institutions for their own purposes and allowed me to start thinking about them as childcare. It was a key turning point in the project. The photo shows Caldwell with four of his children just after he had placed them in the orphanage, around 1891.

The concerts bring together two endeavors, deeply entwined both historically and personally. Stephen’s Banjo Diary: Lessons from Tradition takes its inspiration from the very recordings explored in his book The Beautiful Music All Around Us. The stories there, like the sources for this album, foreground the music against its backdrop in life.

Links to the book and event schedule are below.

Banjo Diary: Lessons from Tradition (CD and digital download from Smithsonian Folkways):  Innovative and often surprising, Banjo Diary: Lessons from Tradition explores knowledge older musicians have bequeathed to younger players. Inspired by past banjo masters of frailing and two- and three-finger styles, Stephen Wade, accompanied by Mike Craver, Russ Hooper, Danny Knicely, James Leva, and Zan McLeod, mines new creative possibilities with pump organ, piano, mandolin, fiddle, guitar, Dobro, and bass. This diary tells of an education written indelibly in a musician’s heart.

The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience (University of Illinois Press) takes as its starting point thirteen iconic performances captured on Library of Congress field recordings between 1934 and 1942 in locations reaching from Southern Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta and onto the Great Plains. Through decades of research and detective work, musician Stephen Wade tracked down surviving performers and their families, fellow musicians, and community members. Weaving together loving and expert profiles of these performers with the histories of these songs and tunes, Stephen brings to life largely unheralded individuals—farm laborers, state prisoners, school children, cowboys, housewives and mothers, loggers and miners—whose music has become part of the wider American musical soundscape. By exploring how these singers and instrumentalists exerted their own creativity on inherited forms, “amplifying tradition’s gifts,” Stephen shows how a single artist can make a difference within a democracy.

Stephen Wade event schedule here.

Author photo © 2011 MaryE Yeomans

Book trailer for The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience.

Ferguson, a retired lawyer who currently resides in Naperville, served for twenty-five years as an Assistant United States Attorney in Chicago. He was presented with the award at the Illinois State Historical Society’s Illinois History Symposium and Awards Banquet, April 27, 2012, in East Peoria.

In Illinois in the War of 1812, Ferguson explores the lives of the civilian soldiers, military leaders, Native-American warriors, and heroes, villains, and opportunists who were drawn into the war, how their actions defined the conflict in the west, shaped the identity and boundaries of the Midwest, and propelled the nation toward its role as an imperialist power in the mid-nineteenth century.

Congratulations, Gillum!

From the Locus Science Fiction Foundation press release:

“Winners will be announced during the Science Fiction Awards Weekend in Seattle WA, June 15-17, 2012. Connie Willis will MC the ceremony and judge the annual Hawai’ian shirt contest on Saturday, June 16. Additional weekend events include author readings,  a kickoff meet-and-greet, panels with leading authors, an autograph session with books available for sale thanks to University Book Store, and a lunch banquet, all followed by the Clarion West Party on Saturday night honoring Clarion West supporters, awards weekend ticket holders, and special guests.”