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Richard Wright as Bigger Thomas
Richard Wright as Bigger Thomas in the 1951 film adaptation of Native SonOver the past year, Studio 360 has been producing new hour-long specials for our American Icons series. This fall, we'll be...
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American Icons: Season 3 Preview
This September, we'll launch a new season of our award-winning documentary series American Icons. In past seasons, we've explored the mother of all sitcoms, I Love Lucy; a revolutionary memoir, The...
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American Icons: Native Son
This is the novel about racism that America couldn't ignore.The story of a young man in the ghetto who turns to murder was an overnight sensation. Richard Wright set out to confront white readers with...
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American Icons: Anything Goes
This is our anthem to being naughty.Before Broadway musicals got serious about West Side gangs or Fleet Street barbers, Cole Porter entertained audiences with frothy tales of socialites, gangsters, and...
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American Icons: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
This is the story of America’s fight against authority. Ken Kesey had worked in a mental hospital, but his first novel was really a parable of what happens when you stand up to the Man — a...
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American Icons: Leaves of Grass
This is the poem that taught America to sing itself. A consummate patriot, Walt Whitman set out to invent a radically new form of poetry for a new nation. His book was first viewed as bizarre and...
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American Icons: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial
This is the monument that changed how America remembers war. How do you build a monument to a war that was more tragic than triumphant? Maya Lin was practically a kid when she got the commission to...
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American Icons: Untitled Film Stills
These are snapshots of America's collective unconscious. Cindy Sherman grew up in the era when old movies filled our late nights. She wrote about going to a dinner party with her parents when she was a...
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American Icons: The Disney Parks
This is America’s vision of utopia. Generations of Americans have grown up with Walt Disney shaping our imaginations. In 1955, Disney mixed up some fairy tales, a few historical facts, and a dream of...
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American Icons: Uncle Tom's Cabin
This is the novel that gave slavery a bad name.Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin to promote the abolitionist cause, basing some of her novel on the testimony of an escaped slave. Her...
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American Icons: The Scarlet Letter
This is the novel that invented forbidden love.One of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ancestors was a judge in the Salem witch trials. In his novel of early America, Hawthorne explores the tension between our...
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American Icons: The Wizard of Oz
Follow the yellow brick road through America’s favorite story and discover places in the land of Oz more wonderful, and weirder, than you ever imagined.It's been over seventy years since movie...
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American Icons: Nirvana's Nevermind
This is the last great invention of rock and roll. In April, the band Nirvana is being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — it’s been 25 years since the release of their first album, a gnarly...
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American Icons: The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Studio 360This is an American revolution set down on the page.When Malcolm X was assassinated at 39, his book nearly died with him. Today The Autobiography of Malcolm X— a favorite of President Obama...
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American Icons: I Love Lucy
This is where television invented itself.It set the model for the hit family sitcom. Lucy was a bad girl trapped in the life of a ‘50s housewife; her slapstick quest for fame and fortune ended in...
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American Icons: Anything Goes
This is our anthem to being naughty. Before Broadway musicals got serious about West Side gangs or Fleet Street barbers, Cole Porter entertained audiences with frothy tales of socialites, gangsters,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
American Icons: The Scarlet Letter
This is the novel that invented forbidden love.One of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ancestors was a judge in the Salem witch trials. In his novel of early America, Hawthorne explores the tension between our...
View ArticleAmerican Icons: Untitled Film Stills
These are snapshots of America's collective unconscious.Cindy Sherman grew up in the era when old movies filled our late nights. She wrote about going to a dinner party with her parents when she was a...
View ArticleAmerican Icons: The Tramp
This is silent film's most memorable character.Charlie Chaplin was a music-hall comedian when he started shooting pictures at the Keystone Studios in Los Angeles in 1914, right at the dawn of silent...
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American Icons: Mad Magazine
This is the magazine that made America snarky.In 1954, a U.S. Senate subcommittee investigating juvenile delinquency called William Gaines, publisher of the successful EC Comics, to testify. “You think...
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American Icons: Fiddler on the Roof
How a milkman from a Russian shtetl became a Broadway star and a hero of postwar American culture.(Studio360)Surely one of the least likely heroes in American theater is a singing milkman from a small...
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American Icons: "Migrant Mother"
This is America's image of hard times.“Migrant Mother” was one of thousands of pictures Dorothea Lange took on assignment for the federal government, documenting the poverty of the Dust Bowl. Before it...
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American Icons: The Disney Parks
This is America’s vision of utopia.This is America’s vision of utopia.Generations of Americans have grown up with Walt Disney shaping our imaginations. In 1955, Disney mixed up some fairy tales, a few...
View ArticleAmerican Icons: The Tramp
This is silent film's most memorable character.Charlie Chaplin was a music-hall comedian when he started shooting pictures at the Keystone Studios in Los Angeles in 1914, right at the dawn of silent...
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American Icons: “Mad Magazine”
This is the magazine that made America snarky. In 1954, a US Senate subcommittee investigating juvenile delinquency called William Gaines, publisher of the successful EC Comics, to testify. “You think...
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American Icons: Buffalo Bill's Wild West
This was the spectacle that colonized our dreams.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....
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John Henry
This is America's cautionary tale about working too hard. In the ballad, told countless times over more than a century, the railroad worker John Henry wins a race against a new steam-powered drill, but...
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"Uncle Tom's Cabin"
This is the novel that gave slavery a bad name. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin to promote the abolitionist cause, basing some of her novel on the testimony of an escaped slave. Her...
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American Icons: Nirvana’s “Nevermind”
This is the last great invention of rock and roll.Nearly 25 years ago, a new sound blasted the cobwebs out of every radio station in America. It was angry and bracingly cynical; the album featured a...
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American Icons: “Spoon River Anthology”
This is the book of poetry that cast a shadow on America’s white picket fence. In Spoon River Anthology, the denizens of Edgar Lee Masters’ fictional Midwestern town speak to us from the grave. Death...
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American Icons: Native Son
This is the novel about racism that America couldn't ignore.The story of a young man in the ghetto who turns to murder was an overnight sensation. Richard Wright set out to confront white readers with...
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American Icons: The Lincoln Memorial
This is America's soapbox. Kurt Andersen looks into how the Lincoln Memorial became an American Icon. Sarah Vowell discusses the battle over Lincoln's memory, which lasted for three generations....
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American Icons: "Spoon River Anthology"
This is the book of poetry that cast a shadow on America’s white picket fence.In "Spoon River Anthology," the denizens of Edgar Lee Masters’ fictional Midwestern town speak to us from the grave. Death...
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American Icons: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
This is the story of America’s fight against authority. Ken Kesey had worked in a mental hospital, but his first novel was really a parable of what happens when you stand up to the Man — a...
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American Icons: Migrant Mother
This is America's image of hard times.“Migrant Mother” was one of thousands of pictures Dorothea Lange took on assignment for the federal government, documenting the poverty of the Dust Bowl. But this...
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American Icons: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial
(Studio 360)This is the monument that changed how America remembers war. How do you build a monument to a war that was more tragic than triumphant? Maya Lin was practically a kid when she got the...
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American Icons: The Disney Parks
This is America’s vision of utopia.Generations of Americans have grown up with Walt Disney shaping our imaginations. In 1955, Disney mixed up some fairy tales, a few historical facts, and a dream of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
American Icons: The Lincoln Memorial
This is America's soapbox.Kurt Andersen looks into how the Lincoln Memorial became an American Icon. Sarah Vowell discusses the battle over Lincoln's memory, which lasted for three generations. Dorothy...
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American Icons: This Land is Your Land
“This Land is Your Land” is the national anthem we actually know the words to. Americans sing it at school and summer camp; Bruce Springsteen and the late Pete Seeger sang it at President Obama’s first...
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American Icons: The Wizard of Oz
This is America’s dreamland.It's been 78 years since movie audiences first watched “The Wizard of Oz.” Meet the original man behind the curtain, L. Frank Baum, who had all the vision of Walt Disney,...
View ArticleAmerican Icons: Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts
Leonard Bernstein’s “Young People’s Concerts” with the New York Philharmonic were presented in Manhattan concert halls and broadcast live on national television for 14 seasons. There had been similar...
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American Icons: Monticello
The home of America’s aspirations and deepest contradictions.Monticello is home renovation run amok. Thomas Jefferson was as passionate about building his house as he was about founding the United...
View ArticleAmerican Icons: Shaft
This is a new American hero.It’s been 46 years since Richard Roundtree stepped out of a subway entrance to the Oscar-winning sounds of Isaac Hayes -- and changed American movie-making. The box-office...
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American Icons: Superman
Disguised as a mild-mannered reporter, Kurt Andersen explores the history of Superman with cartoonists Jules Feiffer and Art Spiegelman, director Bryan Singer, novelists Michael Chabon and Howard...
View ArticleAmerican Icons: Amazing Grace
This is America’s anthem for civil rights.There is exactly one old hymn that everyone recognizes, and moves people who have no feeling for the spiritual or religious. “Amazing Grace” transcended the...
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American Icons: Buffalo Bill
This was the American spectacle that colonized our dreams.He was the most famous American in the world — a showman and spin artist who parlayed a buffalo-hunting gig into an entertainment empire....
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American Icons: I Love Lucy
This is where television invented itself.It set the model for the hit family sitcom. Lucy was a bad girl trapped in the life of a ’50s housewife; her slapstick quest for fame and fortune ended in...
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American Icons: The Great Gatsby
Episodes of false identity, living large, and murder in the suburbs add up to the great American novel.Studio 360 explores F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and finds out how this compact novel...
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American Icons: Native Son
This is the novel about racism that America couldn't ignore.The story of a young man in the ghetto who turns to murder was an overnight sensation. Richard Wright set out to confront white readers with...
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American Icons: "The Autobiography of Malcolm X"
This is an American revolution set down on the page. Studio 360 When Malcolm X was assassinated at 39, his life story nearly died with him. Today “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” — a favorite of...
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