Ruby Sisson Library

On Halloween Eve in 1938, people across America gathered around the radio to listen to their favorite Sunday evening program. Expecting to hear the latest drama from Orson Welles's "Mercury Theatre", many were alarmed when news bulletins interrupted the show. New Jersey had been rocked by mysterious explosions. The announcements continued, each more frantic than the last. An invading army's strange and powerful weapons thousands. Listeners feared...

Sentence of death: A young James Dean plays a young man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The night America trembled: A re-enactment of the night in 1938 when Orson Welles' War of the worlds was broadcast on the radio.

A look back at the golden age of radio, discussing the different genres of programs that filled the airwaves, such as soap operas, comedies, and quiz shows, and studying key radio personalities, including Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Fred Allen, and others.

What began as a broadcast performance of H.G. Welles' fantasy, The War of the Worlds, turned into one of the biggest mass hysteria events in U.S. history. American Experience examines the elements that together created this frenzy, including our longtime fascination with life on Mars; the emergence of radio as a powerful new medium; and the creative wunderkind Orson Welles, the twenty-three-year-old director of the drama and mischief-maker supreme....