Radio

New Broadcast of "It's a Wonderful Life"

Edwin S. Grosvenor | Winter 2021

You can now listen to a radio play of the classic story of George Bailey co-sponsored by American Heritage.

The ”Holy Grail” of Broadcast Journalism

Gil Klein | November 2020

Historic microphone used by Edward Murrow for London broadcasts to be loaned to the National Press Club

On a sunny and crisp Saturday morning last month, at a rest stop on New Jersey’s Garden State Parkway, there was a clandestine handoff of “the Holy Grail of broadcast journalism.”

"This Is London": Murrow During the Blitz

Bob Edwards | November 2020

Edward R. Murrow’s radio broadcasts from London, aired live while Nazi bombs fell around him, are classics of journalism – and literature.

Editor's Note: Bob Edwards is a Peabody Award-winning journalist formerly with NPR and Sirius/XM Radio. He is author of Edward R.

Amos’n Andy and the KKK

Walter C. Evans | August 1955

Correll and Gosden—later to become famous as Amos ’n Andy—were originally song pluggers in Chicago.

Radio Gets A Policeman

Herbert Hoover | August 1955

When former President Hoover was secretary of commerce under Harding and Coolidge, he was called upon to cope with a new and perplexing activity.

Dr. Conrad Founds KDKA

Donald G. Little | August 1955

A pioneer amateur operator as well as an able engineer in the radio field, Mr. Little was a Signal Corps second lieutenant, assigned to the Bureau of Standards, when his story begins.

The Early Days of Radio

August 1955

An unpublished story from the files of the Oral History Project

Not the least remarkable characteristic of our accelerated times is the astonishing speed with which the most fantastic scientific developments are accepted as commonplace. Such is the story of the invention and growth of radio.

Time Machine

Frederic D. Schwarz | November/December 2006

25 Years Ago

The World’s First DJ

Frederic D. Schwarz | November/December 2006

Reginald Fessenden made the first radio broadcast in 1906 employing principles still in use today.

On December 24, 1906, in a wooden shack crammed with equipment in the seaside Massachusetts community of Brant Rock, a 40-year-old inventor named Reginald Fessenden made the world’s first radio broadcast.

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.

“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.

Radio Grows Up

Alice Goldfarb Marquis | August/september 1983

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

Lowell Thomas: “Good Evening, Everybody”

Robert S. Gallagher | August/September 1980

American Heritage interviews Lowell Thomas, the journalist whom Damon Runyon described as “the beau ideal of the radio fraternity, first for his complete artistry and second for his personality.

As the lights of London’s Covent Garden dimmed that early August evening in 1919, few people, including the young narrator waiting nervously in the wings, sensed the historic nature of the occasion.

Grand Ole Opry

William Price Fox | February/March 1979

The story of the world’s longest-running radio program and the extraordinary American music it helped make popular

The Nashville winter of 1974 was the Grand Ole Opry’s last season at the Ryman Auditorium, its home for thirty-three years.

Father Coughlin: The Radio Priest

Robert S. Gallagher | October 1972

The Sunday afternoon broadcasts of Rev. Charles E. Coughlin, once described as the "voice of God," were avidly followed by a radio audience of thirty to fifty million Americans during the Thirties.

About 1935, anno Domini, the Reverend Charles E. Coughlin, pastor of the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan, was perhaps the most beloved and most hated, the most respected and most feared man in the United States.

Rudy Vallée: “Heigh-ho, Everybody!”

Robert S. Gallagher | June 1972

The tremendous response to his radio shows led to standing-room-only theatre performances and cross-country tours, but Rudy Vallée claimed it was just good luck and timing.

One night in February, 1928, a technician from WABC, a pioneer radio station in New York City, finished adjusting his amplifying equipment in a nightclub at 35 East Fifty-third Street and signalled his readiness to the bandleader.

“Program coming in fine. Please play ‘Japanese Sandman.'”

Robert Saudek | August 1965

The author recalls the early years of radio in the 1920s. He was one of the first people to sing on radio and later became an editor at KDKA, the first commercial radio station in the U.S.

Gladys King was the most beautiful woman on earth within tricycling distance of Callowhill Street. She was born in 1902 and was now fourteen years old, which would make it five years old for me.

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Featured Authors

Acheson, Dean

Dean Acheson (1893-1971) was an attorney and statesman who served as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 under President Harry Truman. A key architect of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Acheson stressed the importance of multilateral organizations in the fight against totalitarianism. Prior to his service in the Truman Administration, Acheson clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, worked at Washington law firm Covington & Burling, and served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for one year under President Franklin Roosevelt.

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.

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.

Brinkley, Douglas

Douglas Brinkley, a distinguished professor of history at Rice University and Contributing Editor of American Heritage, has written more than 20 books, most recently The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (Harper 2009) and The Reagan Diaries (HarperCollins 2007). Brinkley earned his B.A from Ohio State University University in 1982, and his Ph.D. from Georgetown University in 1989.

Catton, Bruce

Bruce Catton (1899 – 1978) was the Founding Editor of American Heritage and arguably the most prolific and popular of all Civil War historians. He wrote an astonishing 167 articles for American Heritage, and won a Pulitzer Prize for history in 1954 for A Stillness at Appomattox, his study of the final campaign of the war in Virginia. Catton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, from President Gerald Ford, in 1977, the year before his death.

Commager, Henry Steele

A longtime member of the editorial advisory board of AMERICAN HERITAGE, Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998) taught at New York University, Columbia, and Amherst College, and authored more than forty books. He first gained attention in 1930 as co-author, with Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, of The Growth of the American Republic, which became a standard textbook for decades. His anthology Documents of American History (1938) remained a widely used collection of primary sources for many years.

Dickson, Paul

Paul Dickson is the author of more than 55 nonfiction books and hundreds of magazine articles. Although he has written on a variety of subjects from ice cream to kite flying to electronic warfare, he now concentrates on writing about the American language, baseball and 20th century history. Bestselling books include: Baseball’s Greatest Quotations, The Hidden Language of Baseball, and The Joy of Keeping Score.

Dolin, Eric Jay

Eric Jay Dolin is a bestselling author of popular books on American history, maritime history, and the environment. His works include Fur, Fortune, And Empire, a history of America's fur trade, Black Flags, Blue Waters, about the history of pirating in America, and Leviathan, about the history of whaling in the U.S. His more recent book is A Furious Sky, which retraces 500 years of hurricanes in America and the impact they had on the nation's development.

Eisenhower, John D.

John D. Eisenhower, the son of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, is a retired United States Army officer and the author of several books on military history. He served as the U.S. Ambassador to Belgium from 1969 to 1971.

Ellis, Joseph J.

Joseph J. Ellis, winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in History for Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (Knopf 2000), is the Ford Foundation Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College whose work focuses on the lives and times of the founders of the United States of America.

Fleming, Thomas

Thomas Fleming is a longtime contributor to American Heritage and former president of the Society of American Historians.

Flexner, James Thomas

James Thomas Flexner (1908-2003) was most famous for his extensive writings on American art history and a four-volume biography of George Washington, for which he won a special Pulitzer citation. Flexner's other historical biographies include the one-volume Washington: The Indispensable Man, The Young Hamilton, Mohawk Baronet (Sir William Johnson, 1st Baronet), and The Traitor and the Spy: Benedict Arnold and John Andre.

Foner, Eric

Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, has served as president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Society of American Historians. One of the foremost experts on the Civil War, Slavery, Reconstruction, and Abraham Lincoln, Foner's most recent book, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, published in the fall of 2010, won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2011.

Gates, Henry Louis

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, and the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. He recently completed The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader (Basic Civitas Books, 2012), a collection of essays on history, culture, and African-American genealogy. Gates has hosted several PBS television miniseries, including the history and travel program Wonders of the African World and the biographical African American Lives and Faces of America.

Gordon, John Steele

John Steele Gordon has been a frequent contributor to American Heritage and the Wall Street Journal. He is the author most recently of An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (HarperCollins 2004). Gordon's writing concentrates on business and financial history, and his 1999 book, The Great Game: The Emergence of Wall Street as a World Power, 1653-2000, was adapted into a two-hour CNBC special.

Gordon-Reed, Annette

Annette Gordon-Reed is the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History, Professor of History and Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.

Holzer, Harold

Harold Holzer, a frequent contributor and winner of a 2005 Lincoln Prize for Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President (Simon & Schuster 2006), has written more than 40 books about the 16th president. He currently chairs The Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation and was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush in 2008. Holzer, educated at the City University of New York, first worked as a newspaper editor for The Manhattan Tribune, served as a political campaign press secretary for Congresswoman Bella S.

Lukacs, John

John Lukacs served as a Professor of History at Chestnut Hill College from 1947 to 1994, and is the noted author of over 30 books including:Outgrowing Democracy: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century, The Legacy of the Second World War and The Future of History in 2011.

Maier, Pauline

Pauline Maier was the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of American History at MIT. She primarily wrote on the American Revolution and Early Republic. Her book, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence, was named as a top book of 1997 by the New York Times Book Review and was a finalist in General Nonfiction for the National Book Critics' Circle Award. Her book Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 won the prestigious George Washington Book Prize in 2010.

McCullough, David

David McCullough is an author, narrator, historian, and lecturer. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and Francis Parkman Prizes.

McPherson, James M.

James M. McPherson, the George Henry Davis ’86 Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University, is perhaps America’s foremost living Civil War scholar. Among his books are his one-volume history of the war, Battle Cry of Freedom, Lincoln and The Second American Revolution, and For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, winner of the Lincoln Prize in 1998.

Reynolds, David S.

David S. Reynolds is a literary critic and historian who has written fifteen books about American history, literature and culture. These include Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times, John Brown, Abolitionist, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography, Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson and Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America.

Schlesinger, Arthur

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-2007) was a historian, author, and political adviser who served as Special Assistant to President John Kennedy from 1961 to 1963. Schlesinger won the 1946 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Age of Jackson. In 1966, Schlesinger won another Pulitzer Prize for A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. He was honored with a National Humanities Medal and a Four Freedoms Award before his death in 2007.

Tuchman, Barbara W.

Barbara Tuchman (1912 – 1989) was an American historian and author who first became known for her best-selling book The Guns of August, a history of the prelude to and first month of World War I, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1963. She won a second Pulitzer for Stilwell and the American Experience in China (1972).

Watkins, T. H.

One of the foremost chroniclers of the American West, T. H. Watkins was an editor at American Heritage for six years and a long-time contributor. He also served as Editor of Wilderness magazine for fifteen years, and as Wallace Stegner Distinguished Professor of Western American Studies at Montana State University.

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