Historic Voices: Global History and Culture

(Bonus) Transcript of President Reagan's speech given at the Brandenburg Gates in Berlin is often referred to as the "Tear Down This Wall" speech.

(Bonus) Ronald Wilson Reagan (February 6, 1911 – June 5, 2004) was an American politician who served as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served as the 33rd governor of California from 1967 to 1975 after a career as a Hollywood actor and union leader. Reagan was born into a low-income family in Tampico, Illinois. He graduated...

S03-E18 President Ronald Reagan spoke at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin that is often referred to as the "Tear Down this Wall" speech. Like many other U.S. presidents, President Reagan gave a speech in Berlin during the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviets. To demonstrate solidarity with the German people who were in Soviet-occupied East Germany, President Kennedy stated two decades earlier "...

(Bonus) The John F. Kennedy Space Center (KSC, originally known as the NASA Launch Operations Center), located on Merritt Island, Florida, is one of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) ten field centers. Since December 1968, KSC has been NASA's primary launch center of human spaceflight. Launch operations for the Apollo, Skylab and Space Shuttle programs were carried out fro...

(Bonus) John Fitzgerald Kennedy (May 29, 1917 – November 22, 1963), often referred to by his initials JFK, was an American politician who served as the 35th president of the United States from 1961 until his assassination near the end of his third year in office. Kennedy served at the height of the Cold War, and the majority of his work as president concerned relations with the Soviet Union and Cu...

(Bonus) A theme of the talk by President Kennedy is summed up in one of the quotations from the speech, " all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage ." He explains why it is worth the cost to go to the moon.

S03-E17 We feature President John F Kennedy and his speech on America's Space Program delivered at Rice University on September 12, 1962. At this stage of the space race with the Soviets, the U.S. has successfully placed several astronauts into space. A theme of the talk by President Kennedy is summed up in one of the quotations from the speech, " all great and honorable actions are accompanied wi...

Bonus: The Space Race was a 20th-century competition between two Cold War adversaries, the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States of America (USA), to achieve superior spaceflight capability. It had its origins in the ballistic missile-based nuclear arms race between the two nations following World War II. The technological advantage demonstrated by spaceflight achievement was seen as necessary...

Bonus: The Mercury Seven were seven astronauts selected to fly spacecraft for Project Mercury. They are also referred to as the Original Seven and Astronaut Group 1. Their names were publicly announced by NASA on April 9, 1959. These seven original American astronauts were Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton. The Mercury Seven crea...

Bonus: Spaceflight began in the 20th century following theoretical and practical breakthroughs by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Robert H. Goddard, and Hermann Oberth. The first successful large-scale rocket programs were initiated in 1920s Germany by Fritz von Opel and Max Valier, and eventually in Nazi Germany by Wernher von Braun. The Soviet Union took the lead in the post-war Space Race, launching th...

Bonus: John Herschel Glenn Jr. (July 18, 1921 – December 8, 2016) was a United States Marine Corps aviator, engineer, astronaut, businessman, and politician. He was the third American in space, and the first American to orbit the Earth, circling it three times in 1962. Following his retirement from NASA, he served from 1974 to 1999 as a Democratic United States Senator from Ohio; in 1998, he flew...

S03-E16 John Glenn describes his historic space flight in 1962 at a press conference immediately after his return.bMr. Glenn answers questions from the national press about orbiting the earth three times. Some of the topics of the nearly 50-minute press conference included experiments he conducted, malfunctions of the equipment, his impression of seeing the earth and stars from the spacecraft, and...

(Bonus) At various times in the more than one hundred years that have elapsed since the song was written, particularly during the John F. Kennedy administration, there have been efforts to give "America the Beautiful" legal status either as a national hymn or as a national anthem equal to, or in place of, "The Star-Spangled Banner", but so far this has not succeeded. Proponents prefer "America the...

(Bonus) Paul Harvey Aurandt 1918 – 2009) was an American radio broadcaster for ABC News Radio. He broadcast News and Comment on mornings and mid-days on weekdays and at noon on Saturdays and also his famous The Rest of the Story segments. From 1951 to 2008, his programs reached as many as 24 million people per week. Paul Harvey News was carried on 1,200 radio stations, on 400 American Forces Netwo...

S03-E15 Paul Harvey shares some thoughts about the song, "America The Beautiful." During this month of Thanksgiving in the U.S., it seemed like an appropriate reminder of what we as a nation are thankful for. In addition to this episode, also included are a PDF document of a biography of Paul Harvey and a longer article about the song and its historical significance. The following links allow you...

S03-E14 U.S. troops who are deployed share their thoughts about Thanksgiving. These young men and women are everyday heroes who are ready to defend freedom for the citizens of the U.S. 

S03-13 We feature Sir Winston Churchill and his short speech "Thanksgiving Wishes for 1944" and an end to WWII.

(Bonus PDF) Overview of the National Women's Political Caucus.

(Bonus) Biography of Shirley Chisholm.

(Bonus PDF) Biography of Bella Abzug.

S03-E12 We feature U.S. Rep. Bella Abzug giving a speech on February 11, 1971. U.S. Rep. Shirley Chisholm introduces U.S. Rep. Abzug at a conference in Washington D.C. Abzug begins by speaking of the role of women in government, and the underrepresentation of women and minorities in the current Congress. She goes on to speak of the lies and deception on behalf of the United States government conce...

(Bonus PDF) Overview of the geodesic dome.

(Bonus PDF) This is a biography of Buckminister Fuller.

S03-E11 We feature a talk by Mr. Buckminster Fuller he gave in 1968. He spoke at  the American Medical Association entitled, "What Quality of Environment Do We Want?" He begins by speaking of the earth as if it were a spaceship, with the sun being the closest "gas station," the next nearest being 100,000 times as far away. He reviews a few ways of looking at what we do to our environment, speaking...

(Bonus PDF) This is a biography of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.