A Rare Recording of...

Variety entertainment dominated the popular recording industry's acoustic era (pre -1925), from its beginnings in the 1890s, when records were made on wax cylinders, right up to the beginning of the jazz age in the mid-1920s. From slapstick vaudeville...

Aimee Semple McPherson (October 9, 1890 – September 27, 1944), also known as Sister Aimee, was a Canadian-American Los Angeles-based evangelist and media celebrity in the 1920s and 1930s. She founded the Foursquare Church. McPherson has been noted as...

Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 - April 18, 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Best known for developing the theory of relativity, he also made...

Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963) was an English writer and philosopher. He was best known for his novels Brave New World and The Doors of Perception.Earlier in his career Huxley edited the Oxford Poetry magazine wrote travel articles, film stories, and...

Amelia Mary Earhart, an American aviation pioneer and author, was born on July 24, 1897. During an attempt to make a circumnavigational flight of the globe, Earhart and her navigator disappeared over the central Pacific Ocean near Howland Island on...

Carl Edward Sagan (November 9, 1934 - December 20, 1996), born in Brooklyn, NY, was an American astronomer and astrophysicist. His best-known scientific contribution was his research on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, including experimental...

Ayn Rand (1905 - 1982) was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, and screenwriter. She is best-known for her two influential novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism. Rand's...

Tyrus Raymond Cobb (December 18, 1886 - July 17, 1961), nicknamed "the Georgia Peach", was an American Major League Baseball center fielder. Born in rural Narrows, Georgia. Cobb spent 22 seasons with the Detroit Tigers, the last six as the team's...

Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872 - February 2, 1970) was born in Monmouthshire, into one of the most prominent aristocratic families in Britain. Russell was a philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, prominent anti-war activist, and an outspoken...

Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872 - February 2, 1970) was born in Monmouthshire, into one of the most prominent aristocratic families in Britain. Russell was a philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, prominent anti-war activist, and an outspoken...

Arthur Neville Chamberlain (March 18, 1869 - November 9, 1940) served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from May 1937 to May 1940.He is best known for his appeasement foreign policy, and in particular for his signing of the Munich Agreement in...

Hear seven minutes of a 1959 interview with Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. This probing interview with Jung, considered the world’s greatest psychiatrist, provides a rare glimpse into his personal viewpoints and sheds insight into his pioneering work....

Carl Jung (1875-1961) was an influential psychologist and author who established the field of analytical psychology. Jung is known for his theorizing about the human unconscious and its relationship to behavior. This recording is part two of a public...

Hear a rare recording from 1939 of Charles A. Lindbergh speaking out against American involvement in Foreign Wars. He states that the Americans should not be asked to fight in foreign countries, but to focus on defense of the United States. Among...

Ernesto "Che" Guevara (June 14, 1928 - October 9, 1967) was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, ruthless executioner, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist. A major figure of the Cuban Revolution, his stylized visage has...

Christabel Harriette Pankhurst (September 22, 1880 - February 13, 1958) was a British suffragette born in Manchester, England. A co-founder of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU)--and daughter of women's suffrage movement leader Emmeline...

Clive Staples Lewis (November 29, 1898 - November 22, 1963), born in Belfast, Ireland, was a British writer, literary scholar, and Anglican lay theologian. He held academic positions in English literature at both Magdalen College, Oxford, and...

Edwin Powell Hubble (November 20, 1889 - September 28, 1953), born in Marshfield, MO, was an American astronomer who played a crucial role in establishing the fields of extragalactic astronomy and observational cosmology. Hubble proved that many...

Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh (October 28, 1903 - April 10, 1966) was an English writer of novels, biographies, and travel books; he was also a prolific journalist and book reviewer. His most famous works include Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful...

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 - December 21, 1940) was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his four novels—This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is The...

The following two audio clips are from Friedrich August von Hayek (May 8, 1899 - March 23, 1992), who was an Austrian-British economist and political philosopher. Hayek shared the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Gunnar Myrdal for...

Father Charles Coughlin (October 25, 1891 - October 27, 1979), was a controversial Canadian-American Catholic priest based in Michigan. Calling for monetary reforms, the nationalization of major industries and railroads, and protection of the rights...

Father Charles Coughlin was a controversial Canadian-American Catholic priest based in Michigan. Calling for monetary reforms, the nationalization of major industries and railroads, and protection of the rights of labor, Coughlin used weekly radio...

David Wark Griffith (January 22, 1875 - July 23, 1948), best known for directing the 1915 film "The Birth of a Nation," is considered one of the most influential figures in the history of the motion picture, pioneering many aspects of film editing and...