Scott Joplin: Treemonisha

Scott Joplin’s (1867–1917) opera Treemonisha is the only opera in existence about the Reconstruction era African-American experience written by a black man who actually lived through it. This fact alone makes the opera a work of tremendous significance. Further, Joplin’s music is profoundly expressive and as stylistically unique as anything ever created in America. Through his score and libretto, Joplin vividly documented a culture that has left us few other artifacts: The echoes of the “field hollers,” spirituals, fiddle tunes, revival hymns, and ancient African dances of his rural childhood are all heard, along with the dialects of his people rising up from slavery. Yet for all of its obvious significance, Treemonisha has been a deeply misunderstood work. The opera was complex and virtually unprecedented, two reasons why 1910s America could not embrace it. And tragically, Joplin's original 1911 materials for the opera were almost entirely destroyed in the early 1960s. In the early 1970s several attempts were made to reconstruct it, but for the most part these were not concerned with the opera’s cultural origins or historic authenticity. But now, on the centennial of this extraordinary creation, comes this new recording of a completely authentic reconstruction of Treemonisha by Rick Benjamin, based on eighteen years of research.

Party Size and Constituency Representation: Evidence from the 19th-Century U.S. House of Representatives

Research on congressional parties assumes, but has not directly shown, that party size affects individual members' calculations. Drawing on a key case from the nineteenth-century House the secession-driven Republican hegemony of 1861 this article explores the hypothesis that party voting not only declines but also becomes more strongly linked to constituency factors as relative party size increases. The analysis reveals that the jump in party size coincides with (1) a decrease in party voting among individual continuing members, (2) a strengthening association between some constituency factors and party voting, and (3) patterns of decline in individual party voting that are explained in part by constituency measures.