Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Edward R. Murrow
The United States Information Agency did not long survive the Cold War it helped wage. But today the lessons it taught us may be more useful than ever.
Fifty years ago this summer the Eisenhower administration created a unique federal agency, one that most Americans never even knew about. Read more >>
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. Read more >>
A veteran reporter looks back to a time when the stakes were really high—and vet military men actually trusted newsmen.
One week in August 1942 several stories on the British war effort appeared on the wires of the Associated Press, written by an AP reporter based in London named Drew Middleton. Read more >>
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. Read more >>
How the novelty item of 1920 became the world-straddling colossus of 1940
In 1921 Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who was charged with what meager regulation of the airwaves there was, called radio “an instrument of beauty and learning.” Waldemar Kaempffert, who, as editor of Read more >>
Operation Market-Garden promised to lay an airborne red carpet to victory, but its final objective proved to be “a bridge to far.”
It would have taken considerable effort to locate an Allied fighting man on the battle line in Western Europe on September 10, 1944, who doubted that the end of the war was just around the corner. Read more >>