History Commons^™

European Jazz: A Comparative Investigation Into The Reception And Impact Of Jazz In Interwar Paris And The Weimar Republic, Douglas A. Kowalewski

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

Both Paris and the Weimar Republic were fascinated with American jazz in the interwar period. Because of jazz's connection to African American culture, this fascination is linked with the themes of identity and race relations. This work will demonstrate that interwar Parisians were not always receptive of African Americans that played jazz, and that the citizens of the Weimar Republic were more aware of and interested in the African American culture that permeated jazz in the 1920s and 30s.

The Struggle To Create Soviet Opera, Miriam Grinberg

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

It is opera, and opera alone that brings you close to the people, that endears your music to the real public and makes your names popular not only with individual small circles but, under favourable conditions, with the whole people. – Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, premier composer of symphonies, ballets, and operas in Imperial Russia in the mid- to late 1800s.

Tchaikovsky made this remark while living under a tsarist regime, but the pervasive, democratic, and uniting qualities of opera that he so vividly described appealed to an entirely different party: the Bolsheviks. Rather than discard the “bourgeois” remains of the …

The Albany Movement And The Origin Of Freedom Songs, Nicole Lenart

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

“We became visible.” This is how Bernice Johnson Reagon, a Civil Rights Movement worker, a member of the Freedom Singers, and the founder of Sweet Honey In The Rock explained how songs uplifted and inspired those blacks and whites who worked tirelessly for freedom throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s. Indeed, freedom songs in the movement gave participants the ability to stand up against their fears, express their hopes and desires, and unite the diverse range of people who participated in the movement. Reagon, now a history professor and music legend, grew up right outside of Albany, Georgia, where freedom songs …