Purging Demons and Rabble Rousers

Date:	October 23, 2002
Time:	7:00 p.m.
Location:	UAlbany Alumni House UAlbany Uptown Campus Albany
Contact:	518/442-4888

Purging Demons and Rable Rousers: Tales of Cold War Albany

"Purging Demons and Rabble Rousers: Tales of Cold War Albany" tells three stories, revolving around three characters, with the goal of revealing the regional and local dimensions of Cold War tensions in post-World War II America:

1) the story of Paul Robeson's visit to Albany in 1947, when, during Albany Mayor Erastus Corning's tenure in office, the legendary artist, scholar, civil rights champion and political figure was denied a concert permit (mainly through the machinations of the mayor),

2) the story of Jeanette Dworkin, an Albany native active in the Albany Communist party (CP) and in various local left-wing organizations (such as the Tri-City Civil Liberties Committee), and

3) the story of Janet Scott, a newspaper woman working for the Knickerbocker News, one of Albany's daily papers (now defunct), who was hounded out of her profession because of her involvement with the CP and regional left-wing unions.

These three tales reveal battles waged within newspaper offices, in schools, in local courts, in State office buildings, and on street corners-battles that divided colleagues, students, teachers, office workers, and friends.

This Albany Heritage lecture is part of the History and Politics series.

Gerald Zahavi is a professor of History at the UAlbany. He was trained at Cornell and Syracuse Universities, and received his doctorate in U.S. history from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University.

Dr. Zahavi is the author of: Workers, Managers, and Welfare Capitalism: The Shoemakers and Tanners of Endicott Johnson, 1890-1950 (University of Illinois Press, 1988), a 2-CD oral history of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, and a number of articles focusing on the history of labor, business, and radicalism. His current research focuses on the history of General Electric; labor and communism (with two books under contract, Embers on the Land, University of North Carolina Press and From Alabama to the Mississippi: The Life and Times of Robert F. Hall, under contract with the University of geiorgia Press); and welfare capitalism (The Open Hand of Capital: Welfare Capitalism in 20th-Century America, under contract with Ivan Dee Press).

Dr. Zahavi is also developing a regionally focused on-line encyclopedia (The Encyclopedia of Albany History). He teaches courses in labor and business history, local and regional history, oral and video history, radio documentary production, general U.S. history, as well as methods courses in quantitative and statistical analysis of historical data.

Zahavi established Talking History, an aural history production center with a weekly FM radio program that is also broadcast over the Internet. In 1997, he co-founded and serves as the editor of the Journal for MultiMedia History, an on-line, multimedia historical journal that publishes peer-reviewed hypermedia articles on a variety of historical subjects and reviews films, radio programs, CD-ROMS, and Web sites related to U.S., European, and World history. Zahavi is now actively involved in the creation of the Clio Media Institute for History at the University at Albany.