Lets Write about "Who Invented Television?" history

Who Invented Television❓📺 in History.com

By Sarah Pruitt a frequent contributor to History.com since 2005, and is the author of Breaking History: Vanished! (Lyons Press, 2017), which chronicles some of history's most famous disappearances.

Multiple inventors deserve credit for television technology, which had its origins in the 19th century.

The way people watch television has changed dramatically since the medium first burst onto the scene in the 1940s and ‘50s and forever transformed American life. 

Decade after decade, TV technology has steadily advanced: Color arrived in the 1960s, followed by cable in the ‘70s, VCRs in the ‘80s and high-definition in the late ‘90s. In the 21st century, viewers are just as likely to watch shows on cell phones, laptops and tablets as on a TV set. Amazingly, however, all these technological changes were essentially just improvements on a basic system that has worked since the late 1930s—with roots reaching even further back than that.

Early TV Technology: Mechanical Spinning Discs

No single inventor deserves credit for the television. The idea was floating around long before the technology existed to make it happen, and many scientists and engineers made contributions that built on each other to eventually produce what we know as TV today.

Television’s origins can be traced to the 1830s and ‘40s, when Samuel F.B. Morse developed the telegraph, the system of sending messages (translated into beeping sounds) along wires. Another important step forward came in 1876 in the form of Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, which allowed the human voice to travel through wires over long distances.

Both Bell and Thomas Edison speculated about the possibility of telephone-like devices that could transmit images as well as sounds. But it was a German researcher who took the next important step toward developing the technology that made television possible. In 1884, Paul Nipkow came up with a system of sending images through wires via spinning discs. He called it the electric telescope, but it was essentially an early form of mechanical television.

TV Goes Electronic With Cathode Ray Tubes

In the early 1900s, both Russian physicist Boris Rosing and Scottish engineer Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton worked independently to improve on Nipkow’s system by replacing the spinning discs with cathode ray tubes, a technology developed earlier by German physicist Karl Braun. A cathode ray tube is a vacuum tube that uses a stream of electrons to create images on a phosphorescent screen. Swinton’s system, which placed cathode ray tubes inside the camera that sent a picture, as well as inside the receiver, was essentially the earliest all-electronic television system.

Russian-born engineer Vladimir Zworykin had worked as Rosing’s assistant before both of them emigrated following the Russian Revolution. In 1923, Zworykin was employed at the Pittsburgh-based manufacturing company Westinghouse when he applied for his first television patent, for the “Iconoscope,” which used cathode ray tubes to transmit images.

Meanwhile, Scottish engineer John Baird gave the world's first demonstration of true television before 50 scientists in central London in 1926. With his new invention, Baird formed the Baird Television Development Company, and in 1928 it achieved the first transatlantic television transmission between London and New York and the first transmission to a ship in the mid-Atlantic. Baird is also credited with giving the first demonstration of both color and stereoscopic television.
In 1929, Zworykin demonstrated his all-electronic television system at a convention of radio engineers. In the audience was David Sarnoff, an executive at Radio Corporation of America (RCA), the nation’s biggest communications company at the time. Born into a poor Jewish family in Minsk, Russia, Sarnoff had come to New York City as a child and began his career as a telegraph operator. He was actually on duty on the night of the Titanic disaster; although he likely didn’t—as he later claimed—coordinate distress messages sent to nearby ships, he did help disseminate the names of the survivors.

Sarnoff was among the earliest to see that television, like radio, had enormous potential as a medium for entertainment as well as communication. Named president of RCA in 1930, he hired Zworykin to develop and improve television technology for the company. Meanwhile, an American inventor named Philo Farnsworth had been working on his own television system. 

Farnsworth, who grew up on a farm in Utah, reportedly came up with his big idea—a vacuum tube that could dissect images into lines, transmit those lines and turn them back into images—while still a teenager in chemistry class.

In 1927, at the age of 21, Farnsworth completed the prototype of the first working fully electronic TV system, based on this “image dissector.” He soon found himself embroiled in a long legal battle with RCA, which claimed Zworykin’s 1923, patent took priority over Farnsworth’s inventions. The U.S. Patent Office ruled in favor of Farnsworth in 1934 (helped in part by an old high school teacher, who had kept a key drawing by the young inventor), and RCA eventually agreed to pay Farnsworth 💲1 million in licensing fees. However, RCA pursued other litigation and then World War II put a halt on production of most consumer electronics, which delayed RCA paying royalties to Farnsworth. Though viewed by many historians as the true father of television, Farnsworth never earned much from his invention and was dogged by patent appeal lawsuits from RCA. He later moved on to other fields of research and died in debt in 1971.

Although the BBC had begun the world’s first regular TV broadcasts in 1936, Sarnoff used his company's marketing might to introduce the American public to television in a big way at the World’s Fair in New York City in 1939. Under the umbrella of RCA’s broadcasting division, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), Sarnoff broadcast the fair’s opening ceremonies, including a speech by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The Rise of a New Medium

By 1940, there were only a few hundred televisions in use in the United States. With radio still dominating the airwaves—more than 80 percent of American homes owned one at the time—TV use grew slowly over the course of the decade, and by the mid-1940s, the United States had 23 television stations (and counting). By 1949, a year after the debut of the hit variety show Texaco Star Theater, hosted by comedian Milton Berle, the nation boasted 1 million TV sets in use.

By the 1950s, television had truly entered the mainstream, with more than half of all American homes owning TV sets by 1955. 

As the number of consumers expanded, new stations were created and more programs broadcast, and by the end of that decade TV had replaced radio as the main source of home entertainment in the United States. During the 1960 presidential election, the young, handsome John F. Kennedy had a noticeable advantage over his less telegenic opponent, Richard M. Nixon in televised debates, and his victory that fall would bring home for many Americans the transformative impact of the medium.

Let's write about helping Gander Newfoundlanders during September 11th anniversary memorial

Reported in the Canadian Broadcasting (CBC) by Alex Kennedy

Gander, Newfoundland gave Americans a lift on 9/11. 25 years later, it was the other way around. American tour bus helps Royal Newfoundland Regiment band get to commemorative service on time.

Royal Newfoundland Regiment Warrant Officer Hannah Gaultois, Prime Tours owner Lisa Busch, and Royal Newfoundland Regiment Sgt. Maj. Dave Connolly had an impromptu meeting in Gander on Friday when the Regiment's band saw their vehicle break down as they were heading to the town's 9/11 commemorative service, and they got a lift to the event from Busch's tour bus. (CBC)

On a day when the compassion of people in Gander, N.L. was being celebrated, a chance encounter at a chicken restaurant led to a tour bus of Americans repaying the favor.

A vehicle carrying members of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment's military band broke down while heading to the town's commemorative 9/11 service on Friday, so the tour bus picked them up and brought them to the Steele Community Centre.

Sgt. Maj. Dave Connolly told CBC News the band was stopped at a Mary Brown's Chicken restaurant when the worst-case scenario struck.

"We're getting back to the bus, and of course, it just won't start. So we're waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and we're thinking, 'OK, we have to get there soon," Connolly said. "There was a couple tour buses there, and I said, 'Well, might as well try."

Connolly, along with Warrant Officer Hannah Gaultois, tracked down one of the drivers and explained their situation. But they weren't in uniform, and that didn't make it a convincing sell, Connolly said.

But once Prime Tours owner Lisa Busch got involved, and saw the group's instruments, she knew what she had to do.

"The whole Come From Away story is running in my mind in the background," Busch said, referring to the Broadway musical detailing Gander's compassion toward travelers diverted to the community on 9/11.

So, the instruments were piled on board, and everyone was able to make it to the community arena on time.

"We're here for the same friendship reasons … It was fun to be a part of," Busch said.

Busch, who came to Gander from Ohio, was leading a group of 14 tourists in town to mark the anniversary. She said she knew about the story of residents' support through Shirley Brooks-Jones, an Ohioan who was diverted to Gander on 9/11.

Brooks-Jones established the Lewisporte Area Flight 15 Scholarship Fund as a result of the care that passengers received.

Connolly said the irony of the save from the American tourists wasn't lost on him 25 years later.

"It's just incredible. It's just one of those things, and it was just they're generosity...it really helped out at the right moment," he said.

"We will always love you", Dolly Parton eulogy in The New Yorker

A wonderful - joyful - Dolly tribute in The New Yorker and on the cover: " ....she could have made the head of Tiffany buy rhinestones."
Dolly Parton for the People: She was commonly called the Queen of Country Music, but that is exactly wrong: she was democratic to her bones. By Kathryn Schulz

Four score and three thousand songs ago, in the middle of a whopping winter storm, a sharecropper and his young wife brought forth upon this continent a baby girl named Dolly Parton. 

If you know the rest of this story, you know that it never gets old.
Her parents, Avie Lee and Robert Lee Parton, had married at the respective ages of fifteen and seventeen. Dolly was the fourth of their twelve children, born in a one-room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River, in Sevier County, Tennessee, and also born into the kind of poverty that meant the doctor who delivered her got paid with a sack of cornmeal and the kids wore the elastic from old underwear as hairbands. At six, she started singing in the church where her grandfather was the preacher. At seven, she began playing a homemade guitar—later, also a jerry-rigged mandolin, constructed from the guts of an old piano she’d found in an abandoned chapel in the woods. 

By ten, she had landed a gig on the local radio station. Three years later, Johnny Cash strode onstage at the Grand Ole Opry and told the Saturday-night crowd, “We’ve got a little girl here from up in East Tennessee.”

It was among the last introductions Dolly Parton would ever need. In the course of her long career, which was almost completely coextensive with her long but not long enough life, she produced some fifty studio albums, sold north of a hundred million records, won ten Country Music Association Awards and eleven Grammys, and got inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Gospel Music Hall of Fame, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. If there were a Fame Hall of Fame, she would be in that, too.

Dismayingly, for those of us who are perpetually stuck on item three of our to-do list, all that barely begins to describe how Dolly Parton spent her days. She also starred in several movies, at least three of which are good; wrote or co-wrote a handful of memoirs, several children’s books, a few cookbooks, and one novel; and created a sprawling business empire that made her into not only the most famous export of Sevier County but also its largest employer. To honor her father, who never learned to read, she started a charity, the Imagination Library, that sends a free book every month to roughly one in seven preschool-age American children. That would have been plenty; richer people usually do far less. But, when her home county was devastated by wildfires in 2016, she sent a thousand dollars a month for six months to every family that had lost a home, and, when the coronavirus came around four years later, she donated a million dollars to help fund the development of a vaccine. As her fellow country-music stars Montgomery Gentry once sang, that’s a life you can hang your hat on.

Still, for all this, songs were always the heart of it.

Dolly never learned to read music, but she could play just about anything with strings, plus the recorder, the harmonica, the saxophone, and even her own fingernails, permanently recorded in all their ninety-words-a-minute acrylic glory in those driving opening measures of “9 to 5,” that national anthem for the nation of women.
Dolly always said that she didn’t have the greatest voice, and, since the competition included Patsy Cline, Wynonna Judd, and Reba McEntire, that was true; nonetheless, hers was somehow the most distinctive in the business. It was a little trembly, a little breathy, good at all the girly stuff, but with a girder of light-gauge steel beneath it, like you’d slink away real embarrassed if you tried to mess with her. She was a dead-center soprano, but her emotional range was ample: she could purr, she could plead, she could growl, she could yodel, she could croon. She could even sort of belt, although a little daintily; compared with Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You,” Dolly’s version sounds as delicate and sweet as Queen Anne’s lace.

As for what she sang about: pretty much everything, at one point or another, but mostly hope, home, hardscrabble happiness, and the irresistible but absolutely exasperating nature of all men excepting Jesus. She sang true country-girl songs, where fishing poles rhymed with fishing holes; and seventies disco-pop, where the band bwaaaaa-chicka-bwaa-ed behind her vocals; and soaring gospel songs and boot-stomping bar tunes and even, pretty creditably, “Purple Rain.” She sang the world’s most joyful heartbreak song (“Why’d You Come in Here Looking Like That”) and the world’s most upbeat lament for a vanishing way of life (“Applejack”) and the only Christmas song this Jew can tolerate come the December deluge of drummer boys: the achingly lovely “Hard Candy Christmas.”

This is to say nothing of the aforementioned “I Will Always Love You,” in which, with meta magnificence, she turned her best career decision—splitting with Porter Wagoner, the collaborator who helped launch her to fame—into one of the world’s most enduring love songs. I hope and trust that about a billion people listened to it yesterday.

Even more than she was a singer, Dolly Parton was a performer, and her longest-running show was herself. Right around age twelve, she became, as Johnny Carson understated in a 1977, interview, “rather zaftig.” Presented by the culture with many mediocre options for how to handle her particular combination of looks, ambition, and gender, she chose one that was not on the menu, stepping into every insult that could possibly be used against a woman like her—dumb blonde, bimbo, trailer trash, whore—and tailoring them perfectly to her 40-20-36 frame. It was impossible to make her the butt of a joke, because she was always in on it, and her own quips were almost as famous as her songs: “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap”; “I’m not offended by dumb-blonde jokes, because I know I’m not dumb. I also know I’m not blond.”

All this was canned, of course, produced like a dazzling smile whenever the world demanded it. She knew both who she was and who she needed to be, and she played it all to a T, part Betty Boop, part Annie Oakley, part Abraham Lincoln. Those closest to her, including Carl Dean, her husband of nearly sixty years, presumably knew some other Dolly, less rehearsed and likely deeper. The rest of us just got the surface, but who could feel cheated? The surface of Dolly was the point, like the surface of diamonds. I don’t just mean her physical self-presentation—the wigs, the clothes, the precarious heels and plunging necklines—although all of that was fabulous; in her prime, she could have made the head of Tiffany buy rhinestones. (She could also make other people want to try on her style: she once entered a Dolly Parton look-alike contest on the sly and lost, to a man.) I mean that she understood, with canny acuity, that what she was selling was authenticity—that’s what all country music is selling—but that the best way to sell it was through artifice. We are talking about a woman who purchased and then walled off her childhood home while simultaneously creating a fake version for the public to visit.

So, too, with herself. Dolly revealed everything, told anyone who asked about the wigs, the eyelashes, the boobs, the boob jobs. She had no shame and nothing to be ashamed of. She never tried to pass off everything ersatz about herself as the genuine article, which had the curious effect of making her seem entirely sincere.

It helped that she embodied our national ideal of authenticity, from the one-room cabin on up to the self-made fortune; whatever phantasmagorical thing a Real American might be, there has never been one realer. The self she showed off was utterly armored and utterly disarming—and, boy, did the world go for it. I have never encountered anyone, of any age, race, class, gender, or taste in music, who didn’t at a minimum admire and more often adore her—her songs, her movies, her moxie, her morals, which seemed so loose yet proved so deep and durable. She was commonly called the Queen of Country Music, but that is exactly wrong: she was democratic to her bones, of the people and by the people and for the people, the duly elected President of our United States of Americans.
Dolly always said that she wanted to die onstage, mid-song, but in the end she did herself one better. Her last public appearance was at the end of June, for the grand opening of a Tennessee truck stop newly named in her honor. Of all the musicians in the world—of all the people in the world—only Dolly could make that seem like the perfect way to bow out of the game. When I heard the news yesterday afternoon, I thought about a song she released at seventy, called “I’m Sixteen,” which isn’t about being that age but about feeling that age. It’s a classic Dolly number in that it brings to mind that gooey New York City street fare, the mozzarepa: it is corny, cheesy, delicious. Midway through, she sings, “It goes to show you’re never old unless you choose to be.” I believe it, or anyway I believe she believed it. In that sense, I am happy to report, the great Dolly Parton died young. ♦
Published in the print edition of the September 7, 2026, issue, with the headline “Dolly Parton.”

Let's write about the late and great feminist Gloria Steinem

Gloria Steinem: Gloria Steinem, the American feminist and journalist whose activism helped push through greater rights for women around the world has died, aged 92. Ms. Steinem passed away peacefully at her home in New York City, surrounded by some of the many who loved her. Born in Ohio in 1934, Steinem grew up in a trailer home. Her mother’s mental illness left her struggling to hold on to work and in and out of sanatoriums. When she was 10, her parents separated and, while growing up in a rundown home in Toledo with her mother, Steinem began to notice the hostility her mother endured as a working woman.  After graduating from a women’s liberal arts college in 1956, Steinem travelled to India for two years, where she worked as a legal clerk in the country’s supreme court. Returning to the US, she worked as the director of the Independent Research Service, a CIA front that recruited American students to disrupt the Soviet-controlled World Youth Festivals in Vienna and Helsinki. Steinem later revealed she had always known who was bankrolling the operation: “If I had a choice I would do it again.” (The Guardian)

Eulogy by Dora Anne Mills, MD, MPH, FAAP:  The View from Maine September 4, 2026
Not Ideology — Epidemiology:  Published on Facebook

Women's standing and women's survival rise and fall together.

Gloria Steinem died this week at 92, and I have been thinking about how to explain to my children's generation what the world looked like when I was a girl growing up in rural Maine, and how much of the distance between that world and theirs runs through her life's work.

When I was born, a woman in Maine (or the U.S.) could not reliably get a credit card or a loan without a husband's or father's signature. She could be fired for becoming pregnant, and often was. If her husband beat her, there was no shelter to go to, no protection order to seek, and little language even to name what was happening. The term "domestic violence" had not yet entered public life. Contraception was not yet a settled legal right. Medical school classes were more than ninety percent men, and the few women admitted were routinely asked why they were taking a seat from a man. None of this was ancient history. All of it was within my lifetime.
Steinem did not change these things single-handedly. No one does. But she was, for half a century, the movement's most tireless organizer and its clearest voice. 

Ms. Steinem co-founded Ms. magazine and the National Women's Political Caucus, testified for the Equal Rights Amendment, and insisted that the things happening privately to women - in their marriages, their doctors' offices, their workplaces - were public questions deserving public answers. That insistence is, at its core, a public health idea. It is the same idea that built our field: that patterns of suffering are not fate, and that naming them is the first step to changing them.

The public health consequences have been profound. The CDC counts family planning among the ten great public health achievements of the twentieth century, because when women can decide whether and when to have children, mothers and babies live. Domestic violence moved from a private shame to a recognized cause of injury and death that our hospitals now screen for and many communities now shelter against. And the professions changed: women today make up more than half of American medical students. My own career - medical school, country doctoring, fifteen years as Maine's state health officer - was built on doors that were pried open in the 1960s and 70s, most of them by women I never met. So was my sister's: Maine, which had never elected a woman governor in its first two centuries, has now done so. And so, I hope, will my daughter's, as she trains for medicine in rural Maine.
If you want to know what the world looks like without those changes, you do not have to imagine it. You can read the data. Around the world, a woman still dies about every two minutes from causes related to pregnancy and childbirth, deaths that are overwhelmingly preventable, and overwhelmingly concentrated in places where girls leave school early, marry as children, and cannot decide the timing of their own pregnancies. In the countries where women's rights are weakest, a woman's lifetime risk of dying in childbirth is more than a hundred times higher than in countries where those rights are strong. The correlation is not a coincidence. Women's standing and women's survival rise and fall together. That is not ideology; it is epidemiology.

The lesson of her century is that these gains were made, not given, and they are kept the same way. Gloria Steinem liked to say that she planned to live to 100, and she nearly did. The best way I know to honor the years she gave us is to spend our own the same way: paying attention, telling the truth about what the data show, and refusing to accept that any mother's death is simply the way things are.

Let's Write about the lovely Dolly Parton

An essay from my friend Dr. Dora Ann Mills an expert public health advocate.

Dora Anne Mills, MD, MPH, FAAP on her Facebook
The View from Maine
August 26. 2026
The Light of a Clear Blue Morning
The news arrived yesterday the way hard news often does now - a push alert between meetings. 

Dolly Parton died at age 80, (a much loved icon of music and public health), at Vanderbilt in Nashville, after a brief battle with cancer. 

Within hours, tributes poured in from country stars and rock stars, presidents and preachers, drag queens and deacons. In a nation that cannot seem to agree on anything, we have apparently agreed on one thing: we loved Dolly.
She would have deflected all this solemnity, of course. This was the woman who famously quipped, "It costs a lot of money to look this cheap", who disarmed every critic and every dumb-blonde joke by getting there first, laughing hardest, and then quietly outsmarting everyone in the room.
I found myself reflecting on why we loved her so. 

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Dolly Parton's life was, among many other things, a masterclass in public health — even though she never used the term.
Consider where she began. She was the fourth of twelve children, born in a one-room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River in the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee. The country doctor who delivered her was paid with a bag of cornmeal. She grew up without electricity or running water, in a region where poverty, isolation, and lack of access to care shaped nearly every family's story. We in public health call these the social drivers of health. Dolly simply called them her childhood, and then spent sixty years doing something about them.
Think about what she actually built. In 1995, in honor of her father, who never learned to read, she started mailing a free book every month to young children in her home county. That program, the Imagination Library, now spans five countries and has put well over 250 million books into the hands of children from birth to age five. We know from decades of research that early literacy is one of the most powerful predictors of lifelong health: of school readiness, of health literacy, of economic opportunity, of longevity itself. Dolly understood, perhaps better than many health officials, that a book mailed to a cabin at the end of a dirt road is a health intervention.
When wildfires tore through Gatlinburg in 2016, she didn't just hold a telethon. She put $1,000 a month, for six months, directly into the hands of families who had lost their homes, trusting people to know their own needs. That is dignity-centered disaster relief, years before that phrase became fashionable.
And in the spring of 2020, in those frightening early weeks of the pandemic, she quietly donated $1 million to Vanderbilt's vaccine research program - money that helped support the early trials of the Moderna mRNA vaccine. A year later, at age 75, she rolled up her sleeve on camera, turned one of her most famous songs into a playful plea for her fans to get vaccinated (“Vaccine, vaccine” to the tune of “Jolene”) and teased those who were hesitating to stop being scared. It's hard to measure how many people got vaccinated because Dolly told them it was safe. But I would wager it was more than any official press briefing persuaded (including some of mine).
And here is what makes her hold on our hearts all the more remarkable: she did not earn it by staying silent. Dolly took public stands - repeatedly, cheerfully, unmistakably. She embraced her LGBTQ fans for decades and defended transgender people when doing so carried real risk with some of her audience, insisting they were simply human beings deserving of love. Asked about gay marriage, she answered with vintage Dolly: "Sure, why can't they get married? They should suffer like the rest of us do." In the summer of 2020, when so many public figures hedged, she said plainly, "Of course Black lives matter," adding, with characteristic bluntness, that she didn't think "our little white asses are the only ones that matter." She renamed her own Dixie Stampede attraction because she understood what the word “Dixie” evoked with its association with the Confederacy.
Any one of those positions should have lost her fans. But they didn’t. Fans who disagreed with her on every one of those issues kept filling her concerts, kept mailing their children's names to the Imagination Library, kept loving her. Why? Because she never wielded her convictions as a weapon. She stated them with warmth, wrapped them in humor, and extended to those who differed the same grace she asked for her own people. She drew circles that pulled people in rather than lines that shut people out. In an era when we are constantly told that taking a stand means making enemies, Dolly proved that it is possible to be unambiguous and still be beloved, that conviction and contempt are not the same thing, and only one of them is required.
But here is what I keep returning to on this sad day: her superpower was not just her voice, her songwriting, or even her generosity. It was trust. Dolly was trusted, and across every line that currently divides us. Red states and blue states. Rural hollows and city high-rises. She earned that trust the old-fashioned way: by never pretending to be anything other than what she was, by loving people before asking anything of them, and by showing up, decade after decade, for the community that raised her. The trust came first, built over a lifetime, and it proved strong enough to carry every truth she later asked it to hold.
We are living through a time when that kind of trust has become our scarcest public health resource. Measles, declared eliminated in this country a quarter century ago, is back. Vaccine policy has been thrown into turmoil. Public health agencies and the dedicated people in them have endured deep cuts. Many of us feel unmoored and overwhelmed by division, worried about the future, unsure what to hold onto.
Dolly's life suggests an answer, and it is not a complicated one. Meet people where they are. Honor where they come from. Lead with generosity rather than judgment. Make the good thing - the book, the vaccine, the helping hand - easy to say yes to, and wrap it in joy rather than fear. She reached people that public health cannot reach, not because she had better data, but because she had better relationships.
She often spoke of one of her own favorite songs, written in a dark season of her life, about the light of a clear blue morning, about how, after the hardest nights, everything is going to be all right. On a day of chaos and uncertainty, in a summer full of both, I choose to hear that as her parting instruction to all of us: grieve, yes. Then get up, look after one another, and get back to work.
Tonight, the moon rises nearly full, the same moon climbing over the Smoky Mountains of her childhood and over the coast of Maine, over red counties and blue ones, over every hollow and high-rise where someone is playing her songs and grieving. It seems fitting. The moon makes no light of its own; it simply catches the sun and gives it back to the dark side of the earth, asking nothing in return. That was Dolly's kind of light.
And a nearly full moon holds its own quiet promise: not yet complete, still becoming, like the work she leaves to the rest of us.
“Vaccine” song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjbSWebA3Ko

Let's write about "How to read a book!"

 This Is the Solution to America’s Literacy Crisis, and It’s a Lot of Fun by Peter Schmidt.

If you’ve read the news lately — or, more likely, heard it, watched it or spied half a headline on your friend’s Instagram feed — you’ve been told that literacy is doomed. High school seniors are reading at the lowest levels in over 20 years, and college students don’t know how to read a book cover to cover. There is plenty to mourn in these developments, but as an English syllabus fixture of yore might have said, reports of literacy’s death are greatly exaggerated.

Having come of age amid Covid-19 lockdowns and the proliferation of social media, young people crave the forms of human connection that teach us to live in the world we actually inhabit, not the one we see onscreen — asking questions, thinking together and beholding the strangeness of the reality passed down to us. 

As it happens, books are uniquely powerful objects around which to organize these sorts of activities.

That’s why the act of engaging with written texts — the basis of our cultural, political and intellectual life for over 500 years — is not coming to an end. It’s changing to meet new needs by offering the kinds of experiences digital technologies can’t provide: synchronous, IRL encounters with other human beings.

In other words, the future of reading is a party.
Books are bringing people together. Gen Z reading groups are popping up across the United States and the Silent Book Club, a community that gathers for silent reading, now has over 2,000 chapters across 68 countries. 

Reading retreats and summer camps hosted by the Bad Bitch Book Club regularly convene between 15 and 90 enthusiasts for weekend-long getaways, giving new meaning to the term “escapist literature.” 

Sally Mercedes, the events coordinator at Magic City Books in Tulsa, Okla., sees bookstores playing an increasingly social function for their customers. “A lot of bookish people tend to be introverts,” she told me. “We need a space where we know that we’re on common ground with others.”
Other experiments are remixing the traditional book club format or breaking out of it entirely. The Consumption Book Club, a “literary and culinary event series” organized by the Gen Z artists Colette Estelle and Kyle Barnes, brings to life works such as Jeff VanderMeer’s “Annihilation” via meticulously themed dinner parties and facilitated conversations. 

A recent public reading of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” organized by 20-somethings drew hundreds of people to Washington Square Park in New York City. 

The Strother School of Radical Attention, where I work, helps to gather groups over a dozen times a month in six states for Sidewalk Study, a practice of reading and enacting long-form texts while moving through public space.
These gatherings vary in location, duration and subject matter, but their unifying spirit is simple: that reading can be as much a mode of vibrant sociality as it is of secluded interiority.
Easy as it is to forget, sitting alone and reading in silence — the activity that professors tend to worry about — was once a novelty. 

In his “Confessions,” Saint Augustine of Hippo relates stumbling upon Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, in a moment of perplexing absorption: “While reading, his eyes glanced over the pages, and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent.” That Augustine bothered to describe this scene tells us something about the way reading commonly took place in the ancient world: as a public practice, recited before groups of lettered and unlettered listeners alike. Herodotus is thought to have read portions of his histories aloud, and performative “recitationes” of written texts were a favored form of entertainment and debate in Imperial Rome.
The practice of reading in and for groups endured in modern times in spaces of religious worship, workers’ study groups and avant-garde literary performances. 

But the spread of the printed word and the subsequent democratization of literacy cemented solitary, silent absorption as the dominant image of the reading person. This is the kind of reading we are taught to do in school. It is also the kind of reading that students are now failing to do in ever greater numbers.
Why? There’s no denying that young people are suffering from the harms of smartphone use and cognitive outsourcing to artificial intelligence. 

These are serious problems, but they are only half the story. Students understand as well as anyone else that long-form text is no longer the exclusive, or even the most effective, tool for distributing knowledge, connecting people across time and space and coordinating complex decisions. We’re in a moment of eclipse: The informational function of books is declining, and their experiential function is coming to the fore. This shift can bring new vitality not only to the lives of readers but also to long-form texts themselves.
Engaging with books as instruments for group experience is not the sort of reading that we encounter in classrooms, but it has plenty to teach us about the complexities of inhabiting the world together — and the ways that our literary inheritance can prepare us for the challenge. While educators may never abandon traditional instruction in solitary reading, right now they face an enormous opportunity to impart a new vision for the role of literacy in public life.

Last month, I helped to organize one of these gatherings in Dumbo, on the Brooklyn waterfront: an all-night group recitation of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” on the eve of the poet’s 207th birthday. We had 25 RSVPs, but, swelled by plus-ones and walk-ins, ended up with closer to 50 people in attendance. Two or three older Whitman enthusiasts joined us, but nearly all of the other people seemed to be in their 20s.
After four hours of recitation, singing, repetition, call and response and countless other experimental reading methods, we decamped to the shore of the East River, where around 2 a.m. we let out a full-throated collective yawp. 

In the breathless quiet that followed, a recent college graduate standing beside me admitted that she had never even read Whitman before. Several nodding heads assured her she wasn’t the only one. Then, emboldened by the company, she proposed: “Let’s do it again📙📘📗❓”

P.S. From Maine Writer:  I recently reviewed on Amazon a very short story read on my Kindle, written by Heather Graham, titled "Mercy Knows No Color".  For those with an Amazon Prime account, this read is probably free if you have an iCloud or e-reader. It is only 13 pages long.

Those who follow Heather Graham will be a little surprised by her creation of a short history lesson couched in the roots of the Civil War.  I recommended this short essay/story for community read aloud programs, even before reading this essay in The New York Times❗ Also, I put the short review on my Facebook page link here.

Let's write about teaching profane literature! OMG next comes book burning

Echo report published in The New York Times by David Ovalle

Florida Professor Fired for Assigning a Profane Story, Lawsuit Says

South Florida State College fired an English professor after she assigned a story about a teacher who talks about sex with her students. Now the professor is suing.

Vinita Prabhakar, who taught English at South Florida State College, said in an interview that she assigned the story to challenge her students.

An English professor is suing the president of a Florida college that she says fired her for assigning a story that he called “political,” according to a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday.

The story, Ottessa Moshfegh’s “Bettering Myself,” is an award-winning story narrated by a fictional teacher who drinks to excess, uses cocaine and discusses sex with her students.
The instructor, Vinita Prabhakar, said in an interview that she had taught the story in her classes for nearly a decade without incident. But in February, according to her lawsuit, the president of South Florida State College, Fred Hawkins, objected to the assignment after a student expressed “mild discomfort.” The president told Ms. Prabhakar that he would not want his college-age daughter to read the story, the lawsuit says.

In a move that is highly unusual for a college president, Hawkins immediately ordered that Ms. Prabhakar be suspended and her contract not renewed, the suit says. The suit asks that she be restored to her teaching position.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a group that advocates free speech, is representing Ms. Prabhakar.
Some courts have ruled that universities can restrict certain speech of university professors in classrooms. 

But, they have also ruled that the First Amendment offers greater protection if the speech is part of professors’ official duties, which can include teaching approved material, and is not disruptive.

Ms. Prabhakar’s attorneys also assert she is protected by a Florida law governing campus free speech. 

Public officials such as Hawkins “may not suppress speech because they dislike the ideas it conveys or fear a reaction to it,” according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit is the latest legal battle over the boundaries of protected free speech in schools in Florida, where Republicans have for years sought to restrict teachings they believe are inappropriate or too left-leaning.

Hawkins and school officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has championed efforts to quash what he has deemed liberal indoctrination in education. For instance, he pushed a parental freedom law that limited instruction on gender and sexuality in elementary and middle schools, prompting some districts to remove books featuring L.G.B.T.Q. characters.

In 2022, DeSantis also signed into law the Stop WOKE Act, which restricts concepts related to sexism and racism that can be taught in K-12 schools. The law sought to do the same in higher education, allowing the state to limit the teaching of ideas related to race, sexism and unconscious bias by tying it to teacher salaries.

A federal appeals court, however, struck down that portion of the law this month. The majority wrote that the provision was a “breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse” in classrooms where students are “trusted to puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard.”

Ms. Prabhakar, who has worked full time at South Florida State College since 2023, said the point of assigning “Bettering Myself” was to challenge students in her introductory reading and writing course. As part of the assignment, students had to read first-person stories told by other unlikable narrators — like “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver — to contrast narrative voice, perspective, vocabulary and style, according to the lawsuit.

In colleges, such materials “take students out of their comfort zone, expose them to new ideas and provide opportunities for growth and intellectual maturation,” the suit said.

Ms. Prabhakar said in the interview that she had taught the assignment in previous years at South Florida State College with approval of supervisors.

The student who had emailed to say the story “made me a bit uncomfortable” ultimately completed the assignment and participated in class discussions without any incident, the suit said.
It is unclear who complained about the assignment to the school administration, according to the lawsuit. It accuses Hawkins of terminating Ms. Prabhakar without a formal complaint or attempt at lesser discipline.

The lawsuit is the latest legal battle over the boundaries of protected free speech in schools in Florida, where Republicans have for years sought to restrict teachings they believe are inappropriate or too left-leaning.

Hawkins, a former state representative and a DeSantis ally, was named president of the public community college in 2023. The school’s main campus is in Avon Park, Fla., southeast of Tampa.

The selection process drew scrutiny because Hawkins held no advanced college degrees and became eligible only after the board of trustees lowered the position’s educational requirements. 

At the time, one trustee acknowledged to The Tampa Bay Times that the board was expected to appoint a Republican and that he had concerns about a potential left-leaning president’s adherence to “woke” ideology.

In the suit, Ms. Prabhakar said she had apologized to the president and agreed to teach only material that appeared in a textbook. But Mr. Hawkins told her he had “been in contact with Tallahassee” and the board of trustees. The suit also names the board of trustees.

Ms. Prabhakar, 51, said that she hoped her lawsuit would help protect fellow professors. “I’m also doing this for my students,” Ms. Prabhakar said. “They were robbed — they were excited to come to class.”