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Before her NBCC win, Clare Cavanagh already had events lined up at the 92^nd Street Y. The first on Sunday, March 20 is a conversation with Edith Grossman titled “Why Translation Matters,” and Grossman’s book of the same name has just been published in paperback from YUP. Both authors are critically-acclaimed translators of the first order; Grossman has often been called one of the most important of our time, particularly for her work on Spanish-English translations of Latin American writers and her hallmark translation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote.

On Monday, March 21, the second event with Cavanagh pertains more directly to the studies of her award-winning book, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics. In conversation with Robert Hass and Adam Zagajewski, she will discuss the works of Czesław Miłosz for the centenary celebration of the Polish poet’s life. The blog at Little Star, a journal of poetry and prose founded by Ann Kjellberg and Melissa Green, has more information on upcoming events celebrating Miłosz. Be sure to grab tickets to the Y events while they’re still available, and if you’re under 35, purchase them at the amazingly discounted price of $10. These are conversations not to be missed.

Carla L. Peterson will be at the Brooklyn Weeksville Heritage Center this Saturday from 1:30-3:30pm to launch her book, Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City. Seats are limited, so be sure to RSVP to [email protected] or call (718) 756-5250. 

Peterson will be giving book talks this spring at various venues in DC and New York. Check here for the full tour schedule.

What if this were a Leap Year? Anyone with a birthday on February 29 would tell you that it hangs in there somewhere every year, even without a date on the calendar. Black History Month would have an extra day and Women’s History Month would have to wait. Instead, we’ll let Pearl Primus, dancer extraordinaire, leap across the gap for us. Later this spring, we’ll be publishing The Dance That Claimed Me: A Biography of Pearl Primus, written by Peggy and Murray Schwartz, who were friends and colleagues with access to conduct more than a hundred interviews with family, friends, and fellow artists about Primus. Offering an intimate perspective on her life and exploring her influences on American culture, dance, and education, the Schwartzes trace Primus's path from her childhood in Port of Spain, Trinidad, through her rise as an influential international dancer, an early member of the New Dance Group (whose motto was "Dance is a weapon"), and a pioneer in dance anthropology.

Primus traveled extensively in the United States, Europe, Israel, the Caribbean, and Africa, and she played an important role in presenting authentic African dance to American audiences. She engendered controversy in both her private and professional lives, marrying a white Jewish man during a time of segregation and challenging black intellectuals who opposed the "primitive" in her choreography.  

As part of the 92nd Street Y’s Fridays at Noon program, the Schwartzes will appear on April 29, 2011 to celebrate the publication of their book, and, along with special guests, to honor Pearl Primus with performances of three of her solos. Mark your calendar now for the special occasion.

This afternoon at 4:30pm, Molly Rogers, author of Delia’s Tears: Race, Science, and Photography in 19^th-Century America, will be interviewed by eminent historian David Blight about her book here on Yale’s campus.

The book retells the story of seven South Carolina slaves who were photographed at the request of Swiss naturalist, Louis Agassiz, who sought to use biological evidence to support the theory of separate creations by proving the inferiority of the African race. Rogers writes: “At the heart of this story is the question of what it means to be human….These people, the people depicted in the photographs—Delia, Jack, Renty, Drana, Jem, Alfred, and Fassena—are at the heart of the story described here. The story is about them, and yet at the same time they are strangely absent from it.” Accompanying the historical narrative are short, fictional vignettes about each of the photographs and their subject, recreating slave perspectives that are otherwise lost to us.

The photographs themselves were only uncovered a few decades ago by museum staffers of the Harvard Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. The daguerreotypes were unusual not only because they were of African-Americans, but ones half-clothed, atypical of the white middle-class, nineteenth-century ritual of getting a portrait done with the new exposure process, invented by Louis Daguerre. Once connected to Agassiz, the daguerreotypes uncovered the century-old fascinations with anthropology, ethnography, and race science.

Since the publication of Rogers’ book, a woman in Connecticut, Tamara Lanier, has attempted to prove that her family descends from Renty Taylor, son of Renty in the 1850 photographs, whom her family’s history accounts for as having changed his surname to Thompson when he was sold to a different owner in Alabama. Although photographs are difficult to use as conclusive proof, Lanier insists that the census and genealogical information she has found point to links between her family and Renty. Of the daguerreotype, she says, “How ironic it is to know that the black African chosen by a scientist to be the symbol of ignorance and racial inferiority was truly an educated and self-taught man.” For Black History Month, her “goal is to correct history and to share with all that…Renty was an educated an exceptional person.” Lanier is expected to attend Rogers’ talk this afternoon.

@Joe DiMaggio2011 Check out today’s fun crossword on Joe’s Facebook Page.

@David_Rogers has a free webinar next Thursday, February 24 to discuss the lessons from his book The Network Is Your Customer: Five Strategies to Thrive in a Digital Age.

Hollywood Sign: The famous icon is ever a tweetable mention. @amanduhh417 @Miss_Savory @DJSamSneaker are among the many to pass it today. With the Oscars coming up next weekend, we’re getting ready with Leo Braudy’s The Hollywood Sign: Fantasy and Reality of an American Icon.

@AlisaCosta @kaydora1 @RichardAlbert: February 18, 1688 marked the first formal protest against slavery. Meanwhile, revolution was brewing in England. What a year! (February 18, 1861 was the inauguration of Jefferson Davis as provisional President of the Confederate States of America.)

@princetonupress is thinking about happiness this week on their blog, too. What can we say: our authors go together.

Representing Justice from coast to coast: @atrzop at Harvard chatted up Dennis Curtis and @SLSlib_newbooks at Stanford celebrates the new addition to their collection.

@Jason_M_Kelly is talking about his book The Society of Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment at IUPUI on April 7. Sign up now to reserve space and lunch.

@lynchcartoons ponders why a 3 year old post about Ivan Brunetti’s 1999 article “I Almost Drew Nancy” in Roctober magazine is getting more attention. Could be that people are getting anxious about to bookend Brunetti’s perspective and experience with the soon-to-be published, Cartooning: Practice and Philosophy?

It’s the return of YUP’s Follow Friday!

@bencarp is hanging out with YUP staff at our AHA booth, with tea, coffee, and cookies.

@3PennyMovies gets into the quirky lunar folklore of Bernd Bruner’s Moon.

@ChrisMacDen is anxiously awaiting his copy of The Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade after reading Michelle Alexander’s new book The New Jim Crow.

@mcnallyjackson hosted David Swanson with Mark Crispin Miller, editor of our Icons of America series, for a conversation on Swanson’s War Is a Lie; Michael Takiff to talk about A Complicated Man; and the editors of the Paris Review.

Marianne Stockebrand, director of the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX, will have a reception and book signing for her new book Chinati: The Vision of Donald Judd.

Saturday, December 11, 4-6 pm

@ David Zwirner Gallery in NYC                    

519 West 19th Street

between 10th Avenue & West Street

New York, NY 10011

Cindy Winner of the Austin Chronicle praises Stockebrand for “captur[ing] the lush austerity of the artist's Marfa project with detailed narrative and subtle, gorgeous photographs that reveal the elements at play in the artwork.” If you can't spare a trip for the Texas-sized installments, be sure to take home this smaller scale testament to Judd's art and legacy.

If you're in the City, be sure not to miss Kyle Gann, author of No Such Things as Silence: John Cage's 4'33", giving a presentation for the Goethe-Institut New York, as part of their Unsound Lounge series, co-sponsored with Unsound. The event is free and open to the public.

The Silences of John Cage: A Presentation

Thursday, December 9, 7 p.m.

Wyoming Building: 5 E. 3rd St b/w Bowery & 2nd Ave.

In The Flowering of New England, a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of 19^th century Boston, historian Van Wyck Brooks creates an American mythology of individuals. Falling somewhere between collective biography and literary narrative, the book tracks a flourishing of intellectual output concentrated in the Boston area between the War of 1812 and the end of the Civil War. Such figures as John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, William H. Prescott, and Ralph Waldo Emerson (among many, many more) emerge as participants in the birth and development of a uniquely American intellectual culture.

Although Richard Francis’ recent study of Bronson Alcott, Charles Lane, and their failed utopian experiment is clearly a work of scholarly research (The Flowering of New England, first published in 1936, is completely lacking in footnotes and citations), Fruitlands possesses the same narrative flow and love of character as its literary-historical forebear. As with Brooks’ masterful study of a region and a people, Francis does not merely describe the events that led to the creation and imminent collapse of the Fruitlands utopian community, established outside of Boston in 1843. Rather, he recreates a specific but critical component of American intellectual life in mid-19^th century New England, anchored by a wealth of characters that would have an enormous influence on this country’s intellectual and literary heritage.

The main character in this narrative is Bronson Alcott: a New England schoolteacher, American Transcendentalist, and woefully incompetent philosopher. In the book’s opening paragraph, Francis introduces Alcott with familiarity and an eye for detail. “In 1834,” he writes, “Amos Bronson Alcott arrived in Boston with his wife Abigail and their two small daughters, Anna and Louisa.”

He was a schoolteacher, at a time when formal qualifications were not needed for the profession, which was just as well, since he didn’t have any. He was a tall, lanky man, with fair hair and rather horsey features, restless and impulsive, with an extraordinary gift for talking.

Although a seemingly ordinary introduction, it is this type of easy and intelligent prose that distinguishes Fruitlands as both a work of history and a work of literature. Starting with observations of a confident but unqualified schoolteacher, a “restless and impulsive” philosopher with little literary abilities but “an extraordinary gift for talking,” Francis takes the reader from a single character into the story of his dysfunctional utopia as well as the intellectual culture of 19^th-century Boston to which he belonged. As the narrative of “one of history’s most unsuccessful utopias” unfolds, a series of mid-century intellectuals emerge as close friends, influences, and skeptics. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, George Ripley, and even Thomas Carlisle all play important roles in this story, providing key historical context as well as literary interest in a rich cast of unique and influential individuals.

Fruitlands does not succeed as merely a story or a history: it succeeds as both, or as Katherine Powers put it in the Boston Globe: “Francis, who is not only an historian but also a noveli