Television

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.

Christine Herbes-sommers | October 2000

IT’S ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO TELL OUR NATIONAL STORY ON TELEVISION, EVEN IF YOU’VE GOT 13 HOURS AT YOUR DISPOSAL. THREE PEOPLE WHO DID IT EXPLAIN HOW AND WHY.

DURING THE FALL OF 1997, our production team at WGBH-TV, Boston’s Public Broadcasting System station began developing a television project that would capture the sweep of American history with, we hoped, real rigor and drama.

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.

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 Great Arrogance of the Present Is to Forget the Intelligence of the Past

Bernard A. Weisberger | September/October 1990

Ken Burns, the maker of a fine new documentary on the Civil War tells how the medium of film can evoke the emotional reality of history.

Ken Burns is no stranger to me. We first met in 1983 at a party that the historian David McCullough gave at the Yale Club to wish a happy hundredth birthday to the Brooklyn Bridge.

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.

Where the Media Critics Went Wrong

Walter Karp | March 1988

The early critics of television predicted that the new medium would make Americans passively obedient to the powers-that-be. But they badly underestimated us.

Way back when I was a teenager, it was common knowledge that the mass media—newly reinforced by television—were generating mass conformity, mass passivity, and mass “loss of autonomy.” They were even producing a new kind of dismal American, a truly ominous being, grimly referre

Forgotten Laughter: The Fred Allen Story

Neil A. Grauer | February 1988

The dour radio comedian regarded his work as totally ephemeral, but a new generation of comics has built upon his foundations

Satire, according to the playwright George S. Kaufman, “is what closes Saturday night,” but for seventeen years Fred Allen used his satiric brand of humor to create some of the nation’s most popular radio comedy.

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.

“I'm Fine, Just Hurting Inside”

Neil A. Grauer | April/May 1986

Robert Benchley, a woebegone chronicler of his own inadequacies, was the humorist’s humorist, a man beloved by practically everyone but himself.

Early in 1939, Robert Charles Benchley—Phillips Exeter Academy, 1908; Harvard, 1912—put on a paper hat and hoisted himself up onto a set of phony telephone wires strung between mock utility poles on a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer sound stage in Hollywood.

When Newsreels Stood Still

James Card | February/March 1985

A little-known ancestor of the nightly news comes to light

The Colorado farmer opened the barn door for me. There, hanging from a nail on the back wall, was an empty 35-mm reel. With that excitement peculiar to collectors, I asked if there were any films left. “I reckon so.

How The Media Seduced And Captured American Politics

Richard C. Wade | February/March 1983

A noted historian argues that television, a relative newcomer, has nearly destroyed old—and valuable—political traditions

TELEVISION HAS BEEN accused of many things: vulgarizing tastes; trivializing public affairs; sensationalizing news; corrupting the young; pandering to profits; undermining traditional values.

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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.