Duke Ellington was born as Edward Kennedy Ellington on April 29, 1899, to a doting mother in Washington, D.C. By his own account in Music Is My Mistress, Ellington grew up a pampered child, well loved by his mother, grandmother, cousins and aunts. He started taking piano lessons as boy because his mother was hoping to provide a distraction from his first great love--baseball.

Ellington confesses that he skipped many a lesson to play baseball when he was a boy, but his talent still shone through. By his teen years, he was writing his own compositions, writing "Soda Fountain Rag" right before he entered high school.

As a teenager, he began going to the clubs, listening to his elders talk learning jazz. By this time his best friend, Edgar McEntree, had nicknamed him "Duke"; according to Ellington, this was McEntree's good-natured way of raising young Edward's status by giving him a "title."

After high school, Ellington stuck around DC for a while, serving as a messenger for the Navy and the State Dept. by day and jamming on the piano by night. In 1923, Ellington decided to follow the drummer in his band to New York, where he became part of the Harlem Renaissance.

It was in Harlem's Cotton Club that he made his name, launching a career that lasted until his death in 1974. Ellington wrote an estimated 1500 pieces during his career, a number that makes him the most prolific jazz composer of his generation. In honor of his birthday, watch the Duke at work, creating America's true "classical" music.

In the last year of the Civil War, "Remember Poison Spring" became the battle cry for a number of African-American soldiers in the Union Army. On April 18, 1864, Confederate soldiers ruthlessly killed the men of the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteers, shooting surrendering African-American soldiers.

The Poison Spring Massacre, as it came to be called, occurred less than a week after the Fort Pillow Massacre in which Confederate soldiers murdered 300 African-American men, women, and children at Fort Pillow after the surrender of the fort to the Confederates.

According to the April 30, 1864 issue of Harper's Weekly, "Both white and black were bayoneted, shot, or sabred; even dead bodies were horribly mutilated, and children of seven and eight years, and several negro women killed in cold blood. Soldiers unable to speak from wounds were shot dead, and their bodies rolled down the banks into the river. The dead and wounded negroes were piled in heaps and burned, and several citizens, who had joined our forces for protection, were killed or wounded. Out of the garrison of six hundred only two hundred remained alive. Three hundred of those massacred were negroes; five were buried alive."

Why this Confederate rage towards the end of the war? Confederate soldiers were angry that the Union army had begun to enlist African-American soldiers, and the official Confederate stance was that captured African-American soldiers were "property," not POWs. That was, of course, the same sort of thinking that allowed slavery to exist and that led the Southerners down the path to war--to uphold their property "rights."

After these two massacres, African-American soldiers vowed to show no mercy to Confederate soldiers they encountered; on April 30, 1864, the 2nd Kansas Colored Volunteers took their revenge for the fate of their brethren in the 1st Kansas at Jenkins Ferry, Arkansas, killing 150 while only suffering 15 casualties.

April 11, 1861. Fort Sumter in South Carolina--the Confederates demand that the federal troops stationed there surrender the fort; Major Anderson replies that "my sense of honor and of my obligation to my Government prevent my compliance." The Civil War begins the next day, on April 12.

It's a war Americans still fight about--was it about slavery? states' rights? honor? If states' rights was the primary issue, would it really have led to war without slavery?

Historian Ira Berlin argues forcefully that even if white Americans, both Yankee and Confederate, tended to dismiss the centrality of slavery in the war early on, slaves themselves recognized that it was ultimately going to be a war that decided their fate.

Berlin writes in Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War: "Lacking political standing or public voice, slaves nonetheless acted resolutely to place their freedom--and that of their posterity--on the wartime agenda. Steadily, as opportunities arose, they demonstrated their readiness to take risks for freedom and to put their loyalty, their labor, and their lives in the service of the federal government. In doing so, they gradually rendered untenable every Union policy short of universal emancipation and forced the Confederate government to adopt measures that severely compromised the sovereignty of the master."

Berlin makes the best case that the war was about slavery from the beginning--because slaves themselves forced the issue, by flooding Union lines and demanding freedom from the beginning of the war to the end.

Harlem. 1916. A young Jamaican arrives at the city on March 22, hoping to meet Booker T. Washington, a personal hero, and enlist African Americans into his organization--the Universal Negro Improvement Association.

Marcus Garvey arrived on the eve of the Harlem Renaissance, helping to usher in that flowering of African-American culture in the postwar era. With his charisma and powerful oratory, he created a mass following, inspiring thousands to celebrate their heritage as Africans.

Two recordings of Garvey speaking in 1921 still exist. In honor of Garvey's legacy, check them out here.