Told

The proliferation of antebellum print is analogous to our own tectonic shifts in how people communicate and what they communicate about.

Scholarly accounts of slavery have been changing, but these correctives sometimes say more about historians than the historical subjects they're writing about.

These storylines portrayed those addicted to drugs and alcohol as lunatics whose only cure can come from punitive measures, abstinence, and “tough love.”

Is media bias attributable to corporate power or personal psychology? Upton Sinclair and Walter Lippmann disagreed.

A new behind-the-scenes book, “There She Was,” and a Smithsonian collecting initiative celebrate the pageant’s centennial.

How a clown won over several generations of children.

Refusing myths of joy and pain in slave narratives.

Crossword puzzles may be a recent invention, but since we've had language we've played games with words.

How Latinos have used public radio and television to communicate their cultures, histories, hopes, and concerns.

CB radio was portrayed as a mostly white enthusiasm in its heyday, but Black CB users were active as early as 1959.

For more than 150 years after it was coined, “terrorism” meant violence inflicted by the state on its people. How did the word come to mean the reverse?

He didn’t make a penny.

But the media is treating him differently than it treated Matthew Joseph Rodermund more than a century ago.

The NFL holiday tradition took off in 1934, when the Detroit Lions hosted the unbeaten Chicago Bears in a game broadcast nationally on radio.

In 1999, NRA leaders agonized over what to do about Columbine, paving the way for the group's approach to mass shootings ever since.

When George Horace Lorimer took over as editor of the Saturday Evening Post, America was a patchwork of communities. There was no sense of nation or unity.

How the federal government enlisted ordinary citizens to spy on each other for the war effort.

How the commission that led to the creation of the U.S.’s public television and radio systems can serve as a model for countering disinformation today.

June Holmes was in her late twenties, working as a social worker on Long Island, when she first heard about “this thing called AIDS.”

A radio drama series from 1941 based on Dr. Hereward Carrington's case records of psychic phenomena.

Here’s how the distribution of genres has changed since 1945 up to present.

On the laughing emptiness at the center of the Republican Party.

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.

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.