Journalists
American Journalists and the Great War
One of the challenges of writing history is deciding where the story starts. For me that not only means deciding where I begin telling the story, but how much of the backstory I need to understand. The short answer is, a lot. I am never comfortable making broad generalizations based on other people’s broad generalizations.…
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American Journalists and the “Grand Refrigerator”: A Small Pearl Harbor Story
Two days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the American government arrested hundreds of German, Italian, and Japanese citizens who were resident in the United States as enemy aliens. Among those arrested were German diplomats and journalists. In retaliation, the Nazis put all the American correspondents who were still in…
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From the Archives: Orson Welles’ The War of the Worlds and the History of Radio Broadcasting
You’ve probably heard this story before: On October 30, 1938, a 23-year-old theatrical boy-wonder named Orson Welles caused panic among radio listeners with the Halloween episode of his Mercury Theatre on the Air: an adaptation of H.G. Well’s The War of the Worlds.(1) Actors played the roles of correspondents who broke into an on-going [fake]…
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