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When Leaves of Grass was deemed obscene in 1882, Mark Twain wrote a defense of Walt Whitman’s “noble work.” Now, Twain's essay is being published for the first time, in the Virginia Quarterly Review. University of Iowa professor Ed Folsom calls it classic Twain satire.
For decades, journalists like Jerry Mitchell were the only ones shedding light on cold civil rights-era murder cases . Now the FBI and Congress are taking another look. Mitchell explains why, when it comes to civil rights, the past isn’t past.
In the 1950s, the mainstream American press had very little experience covering segregation and its impacts. In a new book, The Race Beat, Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff tell the story of how the civil rights struggle gradually made its way onto the front pages.
In the wake of Augusto Pinochet’s death, U.S. media are debating how the dictator should be remembered. The National Security Archive’s Peter Kornbluh discusses an especially sinister chapter in Pinochet's dealings with his own country's media.
On November 10, 1898, a mob of white supremacists ransacked the city of Wilmington, North Carolina, and toppled its biracial government. 108 years later, The Charolotte Observer and Raleigh’s News & Observer are apologizing for their role in fomenting the violence. Duke historian Tim Tyson tells Bob how newspapers turned neighbor against neighbor and helped usher in Jim Crow.
In "Network," an anchorman erupts and calls on viewers to join him in the now iconic primal scream: "I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!" And in that, he reflected his creator, screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky. WNYC’s Sara Fishko offers this profile.
The name Henry R. Luce is firmly enshrined in the annals of American publishing. But few remember the legendary Time editor’s erstwhile partner, Briton Hadden. And it was Hadden, not Luce, who conceived of the idea not only for Time, but of the “newsmagazine” itself. Brooke talks to Isaiah Wilner, author of a new biography of the man Luce wiped off the face of history.
In 1965, Vietnamese reporter Pham Xuan An went to work for Time. He was a tireless writer, with an unerring sense for facts amidst the fog of war, and became an invaluable source of information for American readers. Turns out he was simultaneously an invaluable source of information for the North Vietnamese, moonlighting for more than 30 years as a spy. Thomas Bass profiled An last year in The New Yorker. He tells Bob about the spy who loved us.
