Saturday, February 11, 2017 at 2 PM at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Please join public radio host and Peabody Award winner Michael Lasser for a talk about popular music during the World War One era accompanied by live performances of some of the most notable songs.
Registration can be found by clicking on the link below:
https://community.pafa.org/pages/public-programs-/the-music-of-wwi
From November 11, 2016 through April 21, 2017, the Library Company of Philadelphia will have on display the exhibition Together We Win: The Philadelphia Homefront During the First World War. Co-curated by Reference Librarian Linda August and Curator of Prints and Photographs Sarah Weatherwax, this exhibition commemorates the 100th anniversary of America’s entrance into the war and the sacrifices and contributions Philadelphians made to the Allied cause. More specifically, the exhibition examines the role that the Library Company, its staff and its shareholders, played in supporting the war effort. Books, photographs, audio clips of World War I era music, home-made Allied flags, a scrapbook, and other ephemera will explore the story of the city and its residents during the war years and their immediate aftermath.
For more information about the exhibition and upcoming programming, please visit: http://togetherwewin.librarycompany.org/
‘Mid an isle I stand.
Under its only tree:
The ocean around
Around like eternity:
‘Mid my life I stand,
Under the bough of thee.
“In an Island” Thomas MacDonagh
Three leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising by Irish patriots against the British Empire were also poets and aspiring playwrights: Thomas MacDonagh, Commandant 2nd Battalion, Patrick Henry Pearse, Commander-in-Chief, and Joseph Plunkett, Commandant-General, Dublin Brigade, Irish Volunteers. All were executed on May 3-4 for their part in the failed rebellion. Their collective deaths robbed Irish letters of an important piece of its cultural heritage. We can’t know how this may have affected the future development of Irish letters—MacDonagh was certainly considered a leading figure in Dublin’s literary world—but if these executions happened today, they would probably be condemned as a form of cultural genocide.
All three men were educators by profession and of the three, only Plunkett had some formal training in military tactics. In all, sixteen leaders of the rebellion were executed in its aftermath—casualties of a different sort in the War to End Wars.
It remained for MacDonagh’s friend and fellow-poet Francis Ledwidge to commemorate MacDonagh’s death:
He shall not hear the bittern cry
In the wild sky where he is lain,
Nor voices of the sweeter birds
Above the wailing f the rain…
But when the Dark Cow leaves the moor
And pastures poor with greedy weeds,
Perhaps he’ll her low at morn,
Lifting her horn in pleasant meads.
