Accustomed as we have been to periodizing history into decades, we’re in for some confusion now: What are we supposed to call this decade? The zeroes? The Os? The aughts? We have no precedents to guide us, since nobody in the past century seems to have spoken in terms of decades until the 1920s, or […]
Steven Biel
Steven Biel,
the director of the History and Literature Program at Harvard University, is the author of
American Disasters and American Gothic: A Life of America's Most Famous Painting.
Posted inFeatures
The Performer-in-Chief
Viewers who stayed tuned to network television immediately following the first Kennedy-Nixon debate on September 26, 1960, saw the Original Amateur Hour on ABC, Jackpot Bowling Starring Milton Berle on NBC, or a prerecorded interview with Lyndon Johnson on CBS. In that unenlightened time when the network news broadcasts lasted only 15 minutes, people had […]