Susan Eloise Hinton was a teenager when she wrote The Outsiders, the story of rival gangs in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She used the pen name “S.E.” so readers wouldn’t know she was a girl, and bought a Camaro with the earnings. “Some of [the novel’s] faults, like its over-the-top emotions and ...
Susan Eloise Hinton was a teenager when she wrote The Outsiders, the story of rival gangs in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She used the pen name “S.E.” so readers wouldn’t know she was a girl, and bought a Camaro with the earnings. “Some of [the novel’s] faults, like its over-the-top emotions and ...
This is the home of America’s aspirations and its deepest contradictions. Thomas Jefferson was as passionate about building his house as he was about founding the United States. Yet Monticello was a plantation worked by slaves, some of them Jefferson’s own children.
In this Peabody Award-winning show, Kurt Andersen sets sail in search of the great white whale.
Twenty years ago this month, a new sound blasted the cobwebs out of every radio station in America. It was angry and bracingly cynical; the album featured a naked baby swimming toward a dollar bill dangling on a fish hook, and it went #1 in the blink of an eye. In the words of music scholar Joshua Clover ...
When Malcolm X was assassinated at 39, his book nearly died with him. Today it stands as a milestone in America’s struggle with race.
It set the model for the hit family sitcom. Lucy's weekly antics and humiliation entered the DNA of TV comedy: from Desperate Housewives to 30 Rock – writers can’t live without Lucy.
He was the most famous American in the world – a showman and spin artist who parlayed a buffalo-hunting gig into an entertainment empire. William F. Cody’s stage show presented a new creation myth for America.
It’s been a century-and-a-half since a minstrel tune called “Dixie” debuted in New York. The song went viral, and soon North and South alike were whistling “Dixie.” With the outbreak of the Civil War, “Dixie” became an anthem of the antebellum way of life. And today we are still fighting over “Dixie.”
"Dallas" has been off the air for 20 years but it's still considered one of the most successful television shows in history. Studio 360 listener Laura Detre nominated “Dallas” on our American Icons website, and we liked her idea so much, we went to Southfork Ranch to understand how Dallas changed the way the world sees America.
Kurt Andersen explores how episodes of false identity, living large, and murder in the suburbs add up to the great American novel.
Using a whammy bar and a fuzz box, Hendrix captured the sound of bombs falling overseas and screaming protestors. “I didn’t think it was unorthodox,” Hendrix said. “I thought it was beautiful.”
“The men were all talking about the great American novel, the great American play,...the great American everything,” said Georgia O’Keeffe. “So I thought . . . I’ll make it an American painting.”
In The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton examined the dangerous compromises facing a woman who wants to set her own destiny, and broke ground for countless writers who followed.
It’s not the fastest motorcycle or the fanciest, but to many Americans, a motorcycle is a Harley-Davidson.
All of America sings it at school and summer camp; Bruce Springsteen sang it at President Obama’s inauguration. Yet Woody Guthrie’s song was once called anti-American, even Communist.
How did Emily Dickinson's unusual poem about death become standard high school curriculum? Studio 360 takes a closer reading at a literary masterpiece.
Kurt Andersen explores how the Lincoln Memorial became America's soapbox, and how our yearning to connect with Lincoln speaks to the better angels of our nature.
Kurt Andersen follows the yellow brick road through America’s favorite story and discovers places in the Land of Oz more wonderful, and weirder, than you ever imagined.
Andy Warhol told people he painted soup because he ate it for lunch every day, but the paintings remain mysterious more than 40 years later.
A look at the most famous little house in America: Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, still hanging off a cliff after nearly seventy years.
Studio 360's American Icons is made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: great ideas brought to life. Studio 360 is a co-production of Public Radio International and WNYC Radio, and is funded in part by Ken and Lucy Lehman, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the SC Group. Our series on creativity and science is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
