The Little Prince Is a New Yorker
Mary Poppins’ creator loved it, Anne Morrow Lindbergh found it inspirational, and Orson Welles tried to make it into a movie. The Little Prince, the best-selling classic fable by French writer Antoine...
View ArticleExploring D-Day’s Underwater Secrets 70 Years On
It has been almost 70 years since the Allied Forces, led by the United States, Canada and Britain, stormed the beaches of Normandy during World War II to liberate Western Europe from the Nazis.The...
View ArticleHow Detroit & Henry Ford Helped Win WWII
In 1941, Detroit answered the call of the nation and ultimately the world when Henry Ford and his son Edsel were asked to deliver 50,000 airplanes. The scale of production of military technology in...
View ArticleReuniting 'Band of Brothers' for D-Day Commemoration
As the world pauses today, first hand accounts of the events of D-Day continue to slip away from our national collective memory. Of the 16 million Americans who served their nation in the second World...
View ArticleThe 21st Century Nuclear Threat
Click on the audio player above to hear this interview.The United States became the first nation to use a nuclear weapon 70 years ago today—an action that marked the dawn of a new age of military...
View ArticleNorman Lear and Roscoe Brown; What's Causing Rising Death Rates for...
Norman Lear is a TV legend. Roscoe Brown is the director of CUNY’s Center for Urban Education Policy. Both are 93 years old, and both served in World War Two. Hear Lear and Brown compare their...
View ArticleWWII Veterans Flew Separately, March Together
Norman Lear is the legendary TV producer behind "All in the Family," "The Jeffersons," "Sanford and Son," and more. Roscoe Brown is the director of the Center for Urban Education Policy at CUNY...
View ArticleLooking Back at Japanese Internment to Understand Today's Islamophobia
With the debate over immigration heating up political rhetoric, comparisons have been drawn between Trump's proposal to ban Muslim entry and identify Muslim Americans and the internment of Japanese...
View ArticleIf War Comes to NYC, We'll Take Care of the Homeless
We'll Take Care of the Homeless is the—to a modern listener—misleading title of this 1942 broadcast. The "homeless" in question are, in fact, those whose homes would be destroyed if the Nazis bombed...
View ArticleMatthew Rhys Plays a Scottish Captain in France During WWII
Director Christian Carion discusses his film, “Come What May,” starring Matthew Rhys. The French film is set in the the small village of Lebucquere in May 1940 as the German army invades Belgium and...
View ArticleAs WWII Drew to a Close, FDR Fought his Toughest Battles
Journalist and author Joseph Lelyveld takes a close look at the tumultuous end of FDR’s life - both personally and politically - in his latest book, His Final Battle: The Last Months of Franklin...
View ArticleThe American Couple Who Risked Their Lives Saving Jewish Refugees
Filmmakers Ken Burns and Artemis Joukowsky discuss their new film,“Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War.” It tells the story of Waitstill and Martha Sharp, a Unitarian minister and his wife from...
View ArticleThe Lost (Now Found), DIY Musicals for WWII GIs
In the final two years of World War II, the US Army was fighting on three continents. It was, to use a Navy metaphor, all hands on deck, and artists of all stripes found themselves enlisted in the war...
View ArticleCate Blanchett on Broadway, "Land of Mine," the Mystery of Love
Cate Blanchett joins us to discuss her Broadway debut in an adaptation of Anton Chekov’s “Platonov,” or “The Present,” along with co-star Richard Roxburgh. Martin Zandvliet joins us to discuss his new...
View ArticleComplicating Good vs. Bad in "Land of Mine"
Martin Zandvliet joins us to discuss his new Oscar-nominated film, "Land of Mine," which he wrote and directed. In the days soon after Nazi Germany's surrender in 1945, German POWs (many just young...
View ArticleThe Formerly Most Wanted Man on Wall Street, Understanding Everyday Life in...
Former hedge fund analyst and New Yorker staff writer Sheelah Kolhatkar joins us to discuss her book, Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on...
View ArticleGrowing up in Internment Camps
Filmmaker Emiko Omori joins us to discuss a retrospective of her films at MoMA titled, “Emiko Omori Retrospective: Rabbit in the Moon.” Omori is a Japanese-American woman who grew up in an internment...
View ArticleFrom Japanese Internment Camps to Mid-Century Modern
Alexandra Lange, architecture critic for Curbed, joins us to discuss her story, “The forgotten history of Japanese-American designers’ World War II internment: Revisiting the link between detention and...
View ArticleWhen Hollywood Went to War
The Netflix series “Five Came Back,” adapted from Mark Harris’ book, explores the Hollywood directors who made propaganda documentaries for the U.S. military during World War II. Executive produced by...
View ArticleWorld War II Victories in the Desert
News from the front, is how this 1941 meeting of the Town Hall Club and Cercle Français could be characterized. With World War Two raging, a representative of the Free French fighting in Africa has...
View ArticleHelen MacInnes
"An adult Ian Fleming," is how Helen MacInnes, acclaimed author of international spy thrillers, is introduced to the audience at this 1964 Book and Author Luncheon. She is here to promote her recently...
View ArticleJennifer Egan on Cops and Mobsters
A lot of people first heard the name Jennifer Egan when her innovative book “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” which contained a chapter written as a teen-ager’s PowerPoint presentation, won the Pulitzer...
View ArticleThe Life and Death of a Japanese Internment Camp
Photographer Stan Honda talks about the book, Moving Walls: The Barracks of America’s Concentration Camps, which was written by Sharon Yamato and features his black and white photography. This book is...
View ArticleThe Past Is Never Dead
This week, we look at how selective coverage shapes our view of foreign borders, conflicts and historical figures — from Syria to Winston Churchill. Plus, a conversation with the editor-in-chief of...
View Article#79: Last Witness: Mission to Hiroshima
On August 6, 1945 the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. It was the first time a nuclear weapon had been used in warfare. There were three strike planes that flew...
View ArticleThe Ski Troops of WWII
The 10th Mountain Division fought in World War II for only four months, but it had one of the highest casualty rates of the war. The division started out as an experiment to train skiers and climbers...
View ArticleMarch of the Bonus Army
Author James Baldwin once wrote, “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason: I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” Criticism — and dissent —...
View ArticleThe Life of Groundbreaking Journalist Maggie Higgins
[REBROADCAST FROM November 30, 2023] A new biography captures the life of groundbreaking New York Herald Tribune reporter Maggie Higgins, who rose to prominence after her reporting on the liberation of...
View Article100 Years of 100 Things: Modernism
As our centennial series continues, Victoria Rosner, dean of the Gallatin School at NYU and the author of Machines for Living: Modernism and Domestic Life (Oxford University Press, 2020), talks about...
View ArticleWars Are Won By Stories
We are living in history all of the time. Nevertheless, there are some times that seem more historical than usual. Like now, when academics and artists and even librarians have come under attack. We...
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