CBS

Arthur Judson | August 1955

To Arthur Judson, well-known manager in the field of music, the new field of radio presented a challenge and an opportunity. The results were both explosive and unexpected.

Who Wants to Be A Mid-Two-Figures-aire?

David Levine | July/August 2001

How luck, television, and a saintly lurker on the Internet combined to let the author visit 1953 for half an hour.

How the Murder of Oswald Helped Make TV

Steven D. Stark | May/June 1997

What you don’t remember about the day JFK was shot

It was a series of sounds and images that had monumental impact and will always remain in the minds of those who watched: the bloodstained suit, the child saluting the coffin, the funeral procession to the muffled drums, the riderless horse.

He Was There

Richard F. Snow | December 1994

An Interview with Walter Cronkite

As the editors discovered right at the outset of planning this issue, it is all but impossible to think about the course of the past 40 years without also thinking about Walter Cronkite.

The Great Coronation War

Reuven Frank | December 1993

In the infancy of television (but not of American royalty-worship), the networks fought their first all-out battle for supremacy over who would get to show Queen Elizabeth II being crowned.

When American television was very young, but American royalty-worship was not, the biggest, loudest, most pointless battle for supremacy among the networks was over which would be first—by mere minutes, if necessary—to show pictures of the coronation of the B

The Quiz-Show Scandal

Walter Karp | May/June 1989

Stempel’s winning technique was simplicity itself: He got all the questions in advance.

In October 1956, the 29-year-old scion of an illustrious American literary family took up a suggestion that countless Americans were then making to their more erudite friends and relations.

Seeing Murrow Now

Geoffrey C. Ward | February/March 1987

One Sunday afternoon thirty-six years ago, in Chicago, I sat with my parents in front of the family’s brand-new television set, with its small, round-cornered screen, and watched the first of a new kind of program on CBS.

“To Bring You The Picture Of Europe Tonight…”

William L. Shirer | June/July 1984

In 1938 the European correspondent for CBS was in Austria when the Nazis marched in. He wanted to tell the world about it—but first he had to help invent a whole new kind of broadcasting.

I FIRST MET ED MURROW at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin on Friday, August 27, 1937. He had sent me a telegram three days earlier inviting me to dinner. I was not in the best of moods.

Subscribe to CBS

Featured Authors

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Atkinson, Rick

Rick Atkinson is the author of dozens of best-selling books on American military history, including The Long Gray Line, a narrative saga about the West Point class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War, and In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also written a three-part narrative history of the U.S.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brands, H. W.

H. W. Brands is a best-selling author, historian, and the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written thirty books, including The Zealot and the Emancipator, a dual biography of the abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln, as well as The First American and Traitor to His Class, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize.

CBS

ARTICLES ON POPULAR SUBJECTS

Enjoy our work? Help us keep going.