Skip to content

Faculty

Page 1 of 33

Carol Oja, Harvard’s William Powell Mason Professor of Music, chair of the Music Department, and the Leonard Bernstein Scholar-in-Residence with the New York Philharmonic, was in the midst of researching another book on Bernstein’s work when “I realized there was this whole really fascinating racial history” connected with the first production of "On the Town."

In 1944, Broadway subversion

Young, gifted creators of ‘On the Town’ quietly stirred diversity into their groundbreaking musical, professor recounts

Arts|

Date

The gender-segregated signatures on this anti-slavery petition (image 1), sent to the 25th Congress from upstate New York, illustrate the “separate spheres” of household life in antebellum America. The work done by study co-author Daniel Carpenter (image 2), points to a trove of petitions now languishing in state and national archives. Another example (image 3) is a “Petition from Ladies of Marshfield, Massachusetts, 1835.”

Foreshadowing feminism

Petitioning against a congressional gag rule on slavery before the Civil War spurred generations of activists

Arts|

Date

Page