Told

In October 1971, The Electric Company flipped a switch and hit the public TV airwaves, aiming to use sketch comedy and animated shorts to teach kids to read.

Football's uniform appeal during the 20th century made it a popular analogy for candidates trying to relate to voters during the 1972 presidential election.

Annie Berke reviews Elana Levine's book on a pivotal genre and its diverse fandom.

For decades, dramatized plot lines about unwanted and unexpected pregnancies helped create our real-world abortion discourse.

The perils of turning the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade into a political symbol.

These communities allowed for blending fact and fiction in creating new identities.

Putting Black characters in situations familiar to White viewers aims to build empathy and interest.

A murder charge, a media frenzy, a banishment, and accusations of sexual abuse in Hollywood. What can the Arbuckle affair, now 100 years old, teach us today?

The inspiration for the 1964 “Extremism in the defense of liberty” speech he wrote for Barry Goldwater.

This overlooked corner of the press provided news by and for people incarcerated. A newly available archive shows it worked hard to reach outside audiences too.

On the anniversary of Booker T. Washington’s historic Atlanta speech, we look back at the rare 1908 recording so that his words would not be lost to history.

In 1956, Elvis Presley was vaccinated backstage at The Ed Sullivan Show in order to encourage teenagers to get the polio vaccination.

In the 1920s, radio was an exciting new mass medium. It was known for providing entertainment, but educators wondered if it could also be used for education.

The classic story of the child down the well played out in Southern California at the dawn of television.

There is a long list of ways America was transformed by the terrorist attacks. But the question of how TV itself was changed is more complicated.

If the press didn’t know what to make of Miss America 1992 Carolyn Sapp, they really didn’t know what to make of domestic violence.

The Magnum photographer looks back on capturing an “inconceivable event.”

The books of the last two decades show how overreacting to the attacks unmade America’s values.

How white-owned newspapers incited racial terror in America.

From the colonial period to the end of the US Civil War, the rattlesnake sssssssymbolized everything from evil to unity and power.

The word “isolationist” has been used by the U.S. foreign policy establishment to narrow the range of acceptable public opinion on America’s role in the world.

Don’t blame the mix of languages; look to quirks of timing and technology.

Leading conservative pundits today are pounding themes that were popular among opponents of Reconstruction.

When the U.S. first encountered the “Aesthetic Apostle."

Instead of yesteryear’s dry and dusty lectures, science communicators are creating new and exciting ways to engage with science.

Making sense of current fights over a word we borrowed from the French long ago.

Teddy Roosevelt made an unlikely alliance with George Bird Grinnell, and together they made efforts to stop poaching and conserve Yellowstone.

The platforms are new, but the form has been around for most of a century.

Revolutionary Americans adopted native snakes as symbols for their cause. Why?

A government-funded group called the Writers' War Board got writers and illustrators to portray the United States positively—and its enemies as evil.