Radical Pacifist

2020 ◽  
pp. 120-150
Author(s):  
Amy Aronson

As World War I began in Europe in 1914, Crystal Eastman helped lead two major peace organizations. She facilitated the founding of the Woman’s Peace Party, today the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), initiating the recruitment of a reluctant Jane Addams to head the national organization while she formed and led the more audacious New York branch. And she served as executive secretary of the American Union Against Militarism, the only American antiwar organization ever to demonstrate that citizen diplomacy could avert war. She joined an impressive group of Progressive reformers—Addams; Lillian Wald, founder of the Henry Street Settlement and the Visiting Nurse Service; Oswald Garrison Villard, National Association for the Advancement of Color People financier and publisher of the Nation; and Rabbi Stephen Wise, leader of the American Jewish Congress. With others, they created the “new peace movement,” which allied world peacekeeping with global democracy, human rights, and economic justice.

Author(s):  
Karen Ahlquist

This chapter charts how canonic repertories evolved in very different forms in New York City during the nineteenth century. The unstable succession of entrepreneurial touring troupes that visited the city adapted both repertory and individual pieces to the audience’s taste, from which there emerged a major theater, the Metropolitan Opera, offering a mix of German, Italian, and French works. The stable repertory in place there by 1910 resembles to a considerable extent that performed in the same theater today. Indeed, all of the twenty-five operas most often performed between 1883 and 2015 at the Metropolitan Opera were written before World War I. The repertory may seem haphazard in its diversity, but that very condition proved to be its strength in the long term. This chapter is paired with Benjamin Walton’s “Canons of real and imagined opera: Buenos Aires and Montevideo, 1810–1860.”


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