Long before you lived here, America was a land of many towns. Our expansive “agrarian society” was barely a society at all, really, save for a loosely connected sense of similar place and purpose. And each place had its own time on the clock. When it was 9:00 am in your town, it could be… Read more »
On Tuesday, the Disney Store makes a triumphant official grand opening in Times Square, shutting down the so-called “Crossroads of the World” with an appearance by a rodent that’s huge even by Manhattan standards. The store has been open to customers for the past few days. I went, and although I’m pleased to see that… Read more »
My interview with Ken Burns, published in time for the premiere of Baseball: The Tenth Inning on PBS, is here! I’ve chopped it into three bits for your digestion. Think of them as three more innings: You may remember I was all a-titter about meeting him on the day we shot this. I was so… Read more »
My mother and I have an ongoing argument. “Life was simpler in the ’50s, Jay. It really was,” she says. I call baloney on that. Just think about what the ’50s offered Western culture: atomic bomb terrors, the HUAC, segregation, women who lived in fear of unwanted pregnancies and could only choose from a few… Read more »
You know about my passion for connecting to American history, and for remembering how we’re all product of it, and how much I love dispelling the patronizing myth that the people who came before us were somehow simpler than we are. When it comes to a geek like me, there’s no bigger geek-out than meeting… Read more »
PBS showed a live telecast of the Broadway revival of South Pacific tonight as the show prepares to close. I saw this production, which opened two years ago, for the first time last Tuesday, and I liked it so much I made sure to watch it again tonight. I know there are a lot of… Read more »
I shot this video in Chicago recently. I had heard that there was a new exhibition about weddings in Chicago, and I called the Chicago History Museum to fish around for an angle that might be right for me to cover for Aol. I was stunned to hear there absolutely was. The curator of the… Read more »
Macy’s wasn’t always on Herald Square. Starting in 1858, it was downtown, on 14th Street. It began as a dry goods store on Sixth Avenue between 13th and 14th Streets, way north of the city’s normal dry goods district down in present-day SoHo. Here, many modern shopping concepts were born. R.H. Macy, the owner, set… Read more »
Here are two videos I made that are seemingly unrelated, but which have a common thread: bartering. The first is a look at George Washington’s actual bookkeeping ledger, which shows that much of his business was conducted through swap. Like: He sold fish to get ingredients for whiskey! The second is about a hospital in… Read more »
It’s just like Google Earth: a flyover of New York City, showing all the rooftops, streets, rail lines and street life. Except it was shot in 1924.