Television

Jim Cullen | Winter 2021

The sitcom “All in the Family” debuted 50 years ago this month, and had a lasting effect on television and American culture.

Editor’s Note: Jim Cullen holds masters and PhD degrees in American Studies from Brown and the author of over a dozen books.

That Was the Year that Was

Karen Hornick | October 2006

On what they still called their “home screens,” Americans got to watch the future.

The Beatles’ appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in February 1964 remains one of the most watched television events in history. Those who saw it remember it almost as clearly as they remember the near-continuous coverage of the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath the previous November.

The Man Who Made "Deadwood"

Allen Barra | June/July 2006

The creator of the immensely popular new Western discusses what makes it truly new.

The Origin of QWERTY, etc.

Frederick E. Allen | May/June 2000

Beyond the myth of ever-faster high-tech change and radical new breaks from the past ...

“We have reached the epoch of the nanosecond.

Early Color TV

December 1997

In the Navy, we found parts to make a color television in 1946. Anything to watch the heavyweight championship.

In 1946, I was in the U.S. Navy, stationed at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C.

This Super Mario Nation

Steven L. Kent | September 1997

The video game turns 25 this year, and it has packed a whole lot of history in that time.

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.

You'll Feel Like a Queen with Frigidaire, Etc.

Harry Matthei | May/June 1997

The imperium of modern television advertising was born in desperate improvisation.

You Missed Something Great On TV (But You’ll Get Another Chance to See It)

James H. Hutson | February/March 1986

What is the connection between India and the Federal Constitutional Convention of 1787?

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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.