America the Beautiful

From Marian Anderson’s 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial to Marvin Gaye singing the National Anthem at the NBA Finals, the theme of patriotism can be heard throughout African American music. Benjamin Ross offers selections from this rich musical heritage. Also: Ann Petry’s The Street, published in 1946, was the first million-selling novel by an African American author. Keith Clark says Petry deserves to be in the pantheon of other great American writers like James Baldwin or Toni Morrison. Later in the show: Poet Walt Whitman in 1862 went searching for his brother George, who had been wounded in a Civil War battle. Mara Scanlon and Brady Earnhart say Whitman was so moved by the carnage he found that he worked as a nurse for the rest of the war. Also: While Edgar Allan Poe is the master of the macabre, Jerome McGann says Poe was more charming and humorous than his famous dark fiction suggests.