Ithaca College

Penny M. Von Eschen, professor of history and American culture at the University of Michigan and the Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer, will present "Duke Ellington Plays Baghdad: Rethinking Power after 1945" on Thursday, April 16, at 7:00 p.m. in room 111 of the Park Center for Business and Sustainable Enterprise.

For over two decades, the U.S. State Department sent hundreds of jazz musicians on tours of Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, Asia, and Latin America. Beginning with a three-month swing through the Middle East and Asia in 1963 and ending with performances in Eastern Europe, Ethiopia, and Zambia in 1973, Ellington and his band improvised with musicians from different musical traditions, promoted civil rights, and experienced the flashpoints of U.S. Cold War diplomacy when they played in Baghdad (during a 1963 coup in Iraq), and also when they performed in Laos in 1972.  

Von Eschen is the author of Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (2004) and Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (1997). She is also the winner of the Stuart L. Bernath Prize of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. She is currently working on a transnational history of Cold War nostalgia.