PBS

The Development of Radio

Think about radio, and what often comes to mind is the crystal clear music and spoken words broadcast by FM stations across America. But radio wasn't always so advanced -- or so popular. Like many ...
PBS

This Flag Helped End Lynching in the U.S.

Every time a lynching occurred in the U.S. between 1920 and 1936, the NAACP flew this flag from their headquarters on Fifth Avenue in New York. Library of Congress. Can one flag really change public ...
PBS

Caught Up in the War on Communism: Norman Borlaug and the “Green Revolution”

Norman Borlaug with Mexican field technicians who contributed to early seed production of improved wheat varieties, in the field near Ciudad Obregón, Sonora, northern Mexico, c. 1952. International ...
PBS

Polygamy, Statehood and the First Woman to Vote

From the Collection: The State of Voting Rights in the U.S. Utah’s Complicated Suffrage History Reaches into Modern Day. SALT LAKE CITY — Hope Zitting-Goeckeritz waited for this day. It was ...
PBS

Mr. Potato Head

Decades before his star role in the 1995 Pixar film, Toy Story, Mr. Potato Head was a business trailblazer. As the first toy to be marketed on television, Mr. Potato Head broke new ground with ads ...
PBS

Latinos and the Consequences of Eugenics

Sonoma State Home for the Feebleminded Hospital, where sterilizations took place. Historical postcard, from the personal collection of Alex Wellerstein. In February 1930, Concepcion Ruiz, a ...
PBS

When White Supremacists Overthrew a Government

A mob celebrates in front of the burned Love & Charity Hall which housed the black-owned and -edited newspaper, The Daily Record. Courtesy of New Hanover County Public Library. This is the story of ...
PBS

The Surprising History of Marriage Counseling

Eugenicists like Paul Popenoe relied on dangerously flawed theories of heredity to describe different groups of people. Popenoe shows a couple a pedigree of "Black People of Artistic Ability," 1930.
PBS

William Randolph Hearst and McCarthyism

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/citizen-hearst-william-randolph-hearst-and-mccarthyism/ Caption: Senator Joseph MCcarthy presents to fellow U.S ...
PBS

“Gloom and Horror Unrelieved”

Upton Sinclair, 1900. Library of Congress. By the turn of the 20th century, the unsavory practices of the country’s meat processing industry had already engendered some major scandals. The most ...
PBS

Sharecropping: Slavery Rerouted

The white folks had all the courts, all the guns, all the hounds, all the railroads, all the telegraph wires, all the newspapers, all the money and nearly all the land – and we had only our ignorance, ...
PBS

Engel v. Vitale

The school day opens with prayer at private school at the Farm Bureau building. Pie Town, New Mexico, June 1940. Library of Congress. Steven Engel was a parent in New Hyde Park, New York. He and a ...