Historical drama anthology · CBS / NBC
Cavalcade of America
October 9, 1935 – March 31, 1953 · 784 broadcasts
A prestige anthology of dramatized American history, Cavalcade of America brought biographies and tales of "humanitarian progress" to CBS in 1935 and then NBC, running all the way to 1953. Its unmistakable signature was a constraint: sponsor DuPont banned every depiction of violence -- no gunfire, no brutality -- so the whole house style tilted toward uplift, achievement, and the quiet drama of human endeavor, scored throughout by the Don Voorhees orchestra. The no-violence brief had an unexpected effect: it drew serious dramatists. A young Arthur Miller wrote for the show, alongside Norman Rosten, Maxwell Anderson, Stephen Vincent Benet, Carl Sandburg, and Robert E. Sherwood, while Yale historian Frank Monaghan and others vetted the facts. Each week a star carried the lead -- Burgess Meredith turned up as Amerigo Vespucci -- in high-budget, accuracy-checked historical drama. The irony ran deep: DuPont, branded a WWI "merchant of death," launched the series as corporate image repair under its motto "Better Things for Better Living... Through Chemistry." That tension is the show's lasting fascination -- a munitions giant's PR vehicle that became a magnet for anti-war playwrights and a national showcase for literary talent. As one of radio's longest-running and most respected historical anthologies, Cavalcade is studied today both as fine dramatic radio and as a textbook case of corporate-sponsored image management.
Collection status:
753 of 784 held (96% complete)
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Episode Spine
Grouped by year. Jump to the full list below, or open a season on its own page.
- 1935 (14 episodes)
- 1936 (52 episodes)
- 1937 (52 episodes)
- 1938 (30 episodes)
- 1939 (22 episodes)
- 1940 (39 episodes)
- 1941 (53 episodes)
- 1942 (52 episodes)
- 1943 (52 episodes)
- 1944 (52 episodes)
- 1945 (45 episodes)
- 1946 (44 episodes)
- 1947 (44 episodes)
- 1948 (44 episodes)
- 1949 (44 episodes)
- 1950 (44 episodes)
- 1951 (44 episodes)
- 1952 (44 episodes)
- 1953 (13 episodes)
1935
The series premiere presents two short dramatizations on the theme of pressing forward against the odds.
October 9, 1935
No Turning Back
Railroad engineer Theodore Judah and his fight to conquer distance by rail.
Stories of the American competitive spirit, including the Oklahoma Land Run.
Two stories of the American will to rebuild after catastrophe.
Dramatizations of the American faith in education.
The story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the struggle for women's emancipation.
Dramatizations of the American willingness to share in times of hardship.
Stories of community self-reliance, beginning with the Mayflower settlers.
The heroism of medical pioneers, opening with anesthesia pioneer Crawford Long.
Stories of American exploration, led by Lewis and Clark.
Feats that defied nature, including the building of the Erie Canal.
A Christmas program on the humanitarian urge in American life.
1936
The long struggle for freedom behind the Declaration of Independence.
American women entering public service around the turn of the century.
A tribute to America's builders and the architecture they raised.
How Americans shortened distance and sped communication.
The enterprising energy woven through the American character.
A pioneer family's loyalty tested on the 1798 Ohio frontier.
A Lincoln's Birthday tribute dramatizing the life of Abraham Lincoln.
The engineers and laborers who built America's great bridges.
Tales of American heroism at sea.
The patriotic songs that have inspired the nation.
Ordinary Americans who serve in danger, from the sea to the firefight.
The conservation movement and those who fought to protect the land.
American authors who won lasting literary fame.
America as a land of opportunity, told through those who seized it.
The builders of America's railroads, including the drilling of the Hoosac Tunnel.
The American drive for safety and those who championed it.
Two centuries of American self-reliance, from 1738 to the present day.
The artistic impulse in America, told through two celebrated artists.
The farmers who wrested a living from American soil.
The hardy Americans who developed the nation's natural resources.
Two stories of American resourcefulness across the generations.
A Texas Day tribute to the heroes of Texas independence.
The inventors of the steamboat, John Fitch and Robert Fulton.
The rise of American journalism, told through Horace Greeley.
A musical biography of composer Victor Herbert.
Part one of a summer series on American band music: the small bands.
Part two of the summer series on the development of American band music.
Part three of the summer series on the development of American band music.
Part four of the summer series on the development of American band music.
August 12, 1936
Development of Band Music in America 5
August 19, 1936
Development of Band Music in America 6
Part five of the summer music series: the evolution of American dance music.
Part six of the summer music series: American musical comedy and operetta.
September 9, 1936
Modern American Orchestral Music
How the modern American orchestra grew, told in music and story.
A survey of the high points of movie music.
The season opener celebrates the American gift for showmanship.
Two stories of Americans lending a helping hand.
The courageous keepers of America's lighthouses and lifeboats.
John Winthrop, remembered as America's first chemist.
Composer Edward MacDowell and the cause of American musical training.
Two stories of great transcontinental journeys across America.
November 18, 1936
The Story of Rubber
The sentimental songs that mirror America's love of home and family.
The Seeing Eye school in Morristown, where dogs are trained to guide the blind.
How Red Cross worker Emily Bissell created the Christmas Seal.
December 16, 1936
The Man Who Had Two Careers
A tribute to the beloved contralto Ernestine Schumann-Heink.
The legend of the Charter Oak and New England's spirit of independence.
1937
How American actors won prestige for a stage once dominated by English players.
John Wesley Hyatt, father of plastics and of the roller bearing.
The sailors' songs of the sea and the men who sang them.
Elizabeth Blackwell, America's pioneering woman physician.
The amateur radio hams who became the minute men of the air.
The long life of industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper.
A clergyman's early crusade for smallpox inoculation.
Soprano Lillian Nordica and the recognition of American singers.
The pioneers who created America's national parks.
The life of merchant and philanthropist Stephen Girard.
Colonial glassmaker Henry William Stiegel and his house of glass.
William Holmes McGuffey and the readers that taught America.
Robert Peary's stubborn drive to reach the North Pole.
The popular songs of the Gay Nineties.
John Sutter and the golden touch that made and unmade his fortune.
George Washington's inauguration as the first president in 1789.
A National Music Week tribute to the songs of the South.
The unrecognized genius behind the invention of dynamite.
A portrait of Thomas Edison, the man behind the inventions.
A salute in song and story to the American Indian.
The chemists who built America's dye industry.
The geological wonder of the Columbia River gorge.
A man of science who followed his star of destiny.
The pine tree shilling, the first coin minted in America.
Luther Burbank, the plant wizard who reshaped American horticulture.
A summer tribute to the music of Irving Berlin.
A tribute to George Gershwin, days after his death in July 1937.
The music of Richard Rodgers, from college shows to Broadway.
Part four of the summer music series, spotlighting a Broadway composer.
Part five of the summer music series: the operettas of Rudolf Friml.
August 11, 1937
Cavalcade of Music, the Part 6
Part seven of the summer music series: the music of Sigmund Romberg.
The music of Broadway composer Arthur Schwartz.
Part nine of the summer music series, opening with Victor Herbert.
Part ten of the summer music series: music in the movies.
Part eleven of the summer music series: the music of Cole Porter.
A program honoring Cavalcade's own musical director, Don Voorhees.
The great American tragedian Edwin Booth.
Mary Lyon, the educator who founded a college for women.
William Penn and his holy experiment in colonial Pennsylvania.
The immigrant fur trader John Jacob Astor.
Clara Louise Kellogg, America's first native-born prima donna.
Inventor Elmer Sperry and the gyroscope that guided ships and planes.
John Bartram, the pioneering American botanist, and his famous garden.
November 17, 1937
The Seeing Eye
Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey's Lady's Book and champion of Thanksgiving.
Ottmar Mergenthaler, inventor of the Linotype typesetting machine.
The drafting of the United States Constitution.
Great Americans who found glory even in defeat.
Dramatic incidents in the life of a master New England navigator.
December 29, 1937
Ernestine Schumann-heink
1938
Robert Hare, one of America's first great electrochemists.
The Big Brothers movement, seen through an immigrant boy's letters home.
Francis Scott Key, the lawyer who wrote The Star-Spangled Banner.
A biography of the many-talented Oliver Wendell Holmes.
The Louisiana Purchase and the doubling of American territory.
Noah Webster, whose name became a byword for the American dictionary.
Anne Sullivan, the teacher who led Helen Keller out of darkness.
Buffalo Bill Cody, the last of the great frontier scouts.
Captain Robert Gray, the navigator who discovered the Columbia River.
John James Audubon and his passion for painting America's birds.
Charlotte Cushman, America's first great stage actress.
The search for iron, told through a frontier woman of spirit and courage.
Thomas Jefferson and his founding of the University of Virginia.
The rise of the 4-H Club movement in rural America.
Astronomer Maria Mitchell, who astonished the world by discovering a comet.
The songs inspired by the mighty Mississippi.
Fra Junipero Serra and the founding of the California missions.
The growth of child welfare in the United States.
Samuel Slater, the father of the American factory system.
The early history of coal, king of American fuels.
Dr. John Gorrie, the physician who pioneered mechanical refrigeration.
Eleuthere Irenee du Pont, founder of the DuPont company.
Legendary Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne.
Peter Stuyvesant and the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam.
The tall-tale legend of lumberjack Paul Bunyan.
1939
John Honeyman, the unsung spy who served Washington's cause.
Edward Bok's rise from immigrant poverty to celebrated magazine editor.
Stephen Foster, America's beloved songwriter.
Alexander Graham Bell and the invention of the telephone.
The Mississippi River and the great man it shaped.
Nathan Hale, the young patriot who gave his one life for his country.
Allan Pinkerton, the famous American detective.
The frontier scout and trailblazer Kit Carson.
The thrilling saga of the Texas Rangers.
The great American clipper ships and their age of speed under sail.
The Iroquois League of the Long House and its rise and fall.
A pioneer woman's family devotion and determination to survive.
John Howard Payne, the wanderer who wrote Home, Sweet Home.
Patrick Henry's rise from obscurity to revolutionary orator.
A centennial salute to baseball, America's national game.
George Washington refuses a crown and secures the young republic.
Juliette Low, who founded the Girl Scouts of America.
Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the great jurist.
Dolley Madison, the spirited first lady of the young republic.
May 29, 1939
Elothere Irenee Du Pont
1940
The explorer Amerigo Vespucci, the man America was named for.
Sam Houston fights Santa Anna after the fall of the Alamo.
Mehitable Wing and her remarkable frontier horseback ride.
Tisquantum (Squanto), the Native American who befriended the Pilgrims.
How Thomas Jefferson came to draft the Declaration of Independence.
The notorious French-born privateer Jean Lafitte.
A portrait of Abraham Lincoln through the Civil War years.
Anne Royall, a pioneering Washington newspaperwoman.
James Fenimore Cooper's Revolutionary War tale The Spy.
Colonel William Barton's daring capture of a British general.
Sam Houston's victory over Santa Anna and the winning of Texas.
Confederate boy-spy Sam Davis, who chose death over betrayal.
John Fitch, the frustrated real inventor of the steamboat.
The treason of General Benedict Arnold.
The life and songs of Stephen Foster.
The great frontiersman Daniel Boone.
A portrait of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.
The life of Revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine.
Nancy Hanks, the frontier mother of Abraham Lincoln.
Roger Williams, an early champion of religious freedom.
Jane Addams and the founding of Chicago's Hull House.
A condensation of the classic musical Show Boat.
John Sutter, the Swiss immigrant on whose land California gold was found.
Composer Victor Herbert, told in story and song.
Susan B. Anthony, pioneer of the fight for women's rights.
Dr. Walter Reed's conquest of yellow fever.
The mystery of the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island.
Washington and the army's desperate winter at Valley Forge.
Matthew Fontaine Maury, the pathfinder who charted the seas.
Young Abraham Lincoln and his first love, Ann Rutledge.
Dr. Joseph Goldberger's hunt for the cause and cure of pellagra.
How Jim Hickok became the frontier legend Wild Bill.
Benjamin Franklin charms the royal court of France.
A romance along the Erie Canal.
Martha Berry and the mountain school she founded in Georgia.
The story behind Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic.
The fiery abolitionist John Brown.
The story of the peaceful, undefended border between the US and Canada.
A Christmas dramatization of the folk play The Green Pastures.
1941
A lively life of humorist Will Rogers.
How cartoonist Thomas Nast brought down Boss Tweed with his pen.
Thomas Cooper, who defied the Sedition Act of 1798.
The poet Emily Dickinson and her hidden love.
How the seemingly idle Benjamin Franklin found his drive.
Henry Clay of Kentucky, the great compromiser.
Abraham Lincoln through the Civil War years.
George Washington travels to his first inauguration as president.
The somber life of poet and writer Edgar Allan Poe.
A colonial voice for tolerance in the wilderness.
Botanist Mark Carleton's global hunt for rust-proof wheat.
A radio fantasy on the spirit of poet Walt Whitman.
Herman Melville's South Seas whaling adventures.
Actor Edwin Booth, brother of Lincoln's assassin.
The tragic life of English poet John Keats.
James Oglethorpe and the founding of Georgia as a refuge for debtors.
Henry Bergh, founder of the ASPCA.
Margaret Fuller, a pioneering American woman journalist.
Horatio Alger, author of the rags-to-riches tale.
Theodosia Burr, the devoted daughter of Aaron Burr.
Frontier legend Davy Crockett recounts his own life.
The Quaker merchant Johns Hopkins and the fortune he left to learning.
Anna Ella Carroll, an unsung woman strategist of the Civil War.
The young frontier lawyer Andrew Jackson.
The sharpshooter Annie Oakley.
Joel Chandler Harris, the modest author of the Uncle Remus tales.
Balloonist Jean Pierre Blanchard's first American ascent.
The Public Health Service solves the mystery of Rocky Mountain spotted fever.
The trial and banishment of religious dissenter Anne Hutchinson.
An intimate evening with short-story master O. Henry.
Engineer Clifford Holland and the tunnel beneath the Hudson River.
Dr. Josephine Baker, the public health doctor who saved children's lives.
A daring Confederate scheme on the eve of civil war.
Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln's great debating rival.
Sacagawea, the Native American guide of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Leif Ericsson, the Viking who reached the New World.
The Apache war chief Geronimo.
The boom and bust of the Comstock silver lode at Virginia City.
Carl Sandburg reads from The People, Yes in a tribute to the land.
A tribute to American women through the generations.
Simon Bolivar, the liberator of South America.
George Rogers Clark's Revolutionary campaign in the wilderness.
A dramatization of Stephen Vincent Benet's The Devil and Daniel Webster.
Naval hero John Paul Jones.
The warm story of a small-town minister and his family.
Frontier settlers in the Mohawk Valley during the Revolution.
General George Custer and the road to the Little Bighorn.
A Civil War romance set on a Mississippi plantation.
A crusading newspaperman in the early Oklahoma Territory.
The medical drama Men in White, its broadcast carrying the first Pearl Harbor bulletins.
A once-great man reclaims his dignity at the ballot box.
Peggy Eaton and the political intrigue of the Jackson White House.
1942
Washington and the army endure the bitter winter at Valley Forge.
The Marquis de Lafayette joins the American Revolution.
A Czech refugee couple in Mexico wait for the chance to become Americans.
A discontented wife learns the true worth of her marriage.
A veteran Canadian bush pilot answers the wartime call to fly.
February 9, 1942
Abraham Lincoln: the War Years
A wartime romance shadowed by a soldier's blindness.
Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith, a doctor torn between science and duty.
March 16, 1942
Dear Brutus
Mary Breckinridge and her Frontier Nursing Service in the Kentucky hills.
March 30, 1942
The Silent Heart
Walter Reed's conquest of yellow fever in Cuba.
The treason of Benedict Arnold.
Thomas Paine rallies the Revolution in its darkest hour.
April 27, 1942
This Side of Hades
Anne Royall, the outspoken newspaperwoman of the Jackson era.
A teacher and the special student she never forgot.
The young Thomas Jefferson and the making of a revolutionary.
June 1, 1942
Clara Barton
William Gorgas defeats yellow fever to make the Panama Canal possible.
June 15, 1942
The Lady and the Flag
Christopher Ludwick, the patriot baker who fed Washington's army.
June 29, 1942
Hymn from the Night
July 13, 1942
Man of Iron
The young naval hero Stephen Decatur battles the Barbary pirates.
Eli Whitney and the birth of interchangeable-parts manufacturing.
Mary Washington, the mother who shaped George Washington.
August 17, 1942
Theodore Roosevelt
Dr. Theobald Smith unravels the cause of cattle Texas Fever.
Homer Lea, the neglected American military prophet.
Richard Harding Davis, a pioneering American war correspondent.
An address by Joseph Grew, former US ambassador to Japan.
The Air Transport Command ferries warplanes across the Atlantic to Britain.
Benito Juarez, the patriot who fought for Mexico's freedom.
A true, wry account of a wartime marriage on Bataan.
A salute to the early traditions of the United States Navy.
The daring aviator Amelia Earhart.
Heroism aboard the Merchant Marine's torpedo-hunted tankers.
Alaska's immense strategic value to America at war.
Sister Kenny, the Australian nurse who transformed polio treatment.
Daniel Webster, the statesman who never reached the presidency.
An original nativity play for Christmas.
Garibaldi's fight to unify Italy, seen through American eyes.
1943
The war strikes home for a young woman on the American homefront.
An American submarine crew's tense wartime patrol.
Marine heroism in the fight for Guadalcanal.
The volunteer Flying Tigers battle the Japanese over Burma.
The young U.S. Marines prove themselves on the shores of Tripoli.
The story behind Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
A small-town doctor answers the call to wartime service.
Hercules Mulligan, the tailor-spy who foiled a plot against Washington.
A Nazi saboteur targets an American defense plant.
John Paul Jones and the birth of the American navy.
The FBI tracks down a kidnapper.
Dr. Norman Bethune and the invention of the mobile blood bank.
A PT-boat cook writes home from the Pacific war.
Coast Guard action against a lurking enemy submarine.
The life and lasting legacy of Thomas Jefferson.
Pastor Martin Niemoller's defiant stand against Hitler.
The training and daring of America's paratroopers.
The first USO Camp Show entertainers reach the battlefront.
The heroic crew of a Navy auxiliary oiler under fire.
Army nurses shipped overseas under sealed wartime orders.
A Navy pharmacist's mate's true tale of frontline courage.
The tragic life of Mary Todd Lincoln.
How careless talk can hand secrets to the enemy.
Mary Putnam Jacobi, a pioneering American woman physician.
The battered cruiser USS Marblehead limps home from the Pacific.
The flight nurses of the new Air Evacuation service.
A poetic Independence Day tribute to the American people.
An Army chaplain's quiet courage at Guadalcanal.
The Army units teaching illiterate soldiers to read.
Nazi spies chase vital industrial diamonds.
The survival ordeal of a B-17 crew downed in the Arctic.
The Aleutian campaign, a short cut on the road toward Tokyo.
Army mules haul supplies through the jungle war.
The wartime lifesaver: the invention of the sulfa drugs.
A tribute to the Navy's construction battalions, the Seabees.
Two brothers in uniform in love with the same girl.
The Army Transportation Corps keeps the war supplied.
Torpedo Squadron Eight's sacrifice and vengeance at Midway.
Thomas Paine, the unloved hero of the Revolution.
A Coast Guard combat cameraman under fire.
Bob Hope recounts his first USO tour to the front lines.
Mary Bickerdyke, the Civil War's beloved battlefield nurse.
Submarine commander Howard Gilmore's final act of self-sacrifice.
Dr. Gordon Seagrave, the Burma surgeon of the jungle war.
How one man headed off a border war between Connecticut and Pennsylvania.
The tramp steamer Contessa's desperate run in the North Africa landings.
A tribute to the American farmers who fed a nation at war.
The Revolutionary War mutiny of the Pennsylvania Line.
A day in the life of a Navy doctor at war.
An American soldier's tour of duty in wartime Iceland.
A merchant sailor twice torpedoed and taken prisoner by a U-boat.
1944
A troublemaking sailor gets one last chance to redeem himself.
Ernie Pyle's frontline dispatches from the North Africa campaign.
A military policeman finds unexpected adventure in the war.
Two Army doctors and their volunteers under fire.
A city editor's grand gesture to win the girl he loves.
The formative youth of Abraham Lincoln.
A wartime valentine of songs and sketches with Frances Langford.
A wounded GI struggles to come home to his New England town.
A determined teenage girl finds her own way to aid the war effort.
Edward Kowalski's escape from Nazi concentration camps to freedom.
A USO accordion player entertains troops in the Pacific jungle.
War correspondent Royal Arch Gunnison, a prisoner of the Japanese.
An American Field Service ambulance driver at the front.
Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox, America's first commando.
A close call as a sculptor casts Thomas Jefferson's life mask.
Dr. Alexander Fleming and the discovery of penicillin.
The adventures of author Mark Twain.
A young American soldier's story, told from the front lines.
The building of the aircraft carrier USS Hornet.
May 29, 1944
Sing a War Song
Benedict Arnold's treason, seen through the eyes of his loyal aide.
Army chaplain William Taggart ministers to men in combat.
Michigan soldiers fight through the New Guinea jungle toward Tokyo.
Robert Morris, the financier who funded the American Revolution.
A combat soldier's story, echoing the spirit of the Liberty Bell.
A GI and his bulldozer work a small miracle in the Sicily invasion.
The wartime race to synthesize quinine.
An American infantry platoon on a deadly mission in Italy.
The women keeping the farms running while their men are at war.
A family collie enlists in the Army's war-dog corps.
The long life of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
How Corporal James Slayton earned the Medal of Honor.
Army doctors confront the hidden wounds of battle fatigue.
Julia Ward Howe and the writing of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
Dr. Norman Bethune and the invention of the mobile blood bank.
Washington's ordeal through the terrible winter at Valley Forge.
Young Abraham Lincoln and his love for Ann Rutledge.
Submarine commander Howard Gilmore's final act of self-sacrifice.
November 6, 1944
Jane Adams of Hull House
The inventive genius of Benjamin Franklin.
Admiral George Dewey at the dawn of the Spanish-American War.
Anne Royall, the crusading Washington journalist.
A Chicago Red Cross volunteer brings comfort to men at the front.
The discovery of surgical anesthesia and the conquest of pain.
A Christmas music-and-story tour across America.
1945
Abigail Duniway's fight for women's rights on the Oregon frontier.
Four captured American airmen resist Nazi interrogation.
Jessie Benton Fremont, devoted wife of the explorer John C. Fremont.
Banting and Best race to discover insulin and save a dying child.
A wartime program marking the Allied drive toward Berlin.
A lovable, hapless GI turns to the Red Cross for help.
The crew of a landing ship through several invasions.
A stingy old Irishman's change of heart over the Statue of Liberty.
April 2, 1945
My Wayward Parent
Dr. Katharine Neel Dale, a pioneering missionary doctor in Mexico.
Edward Kuder and the Filipinos who never stopped resisting.
An artist volunteers to sketch portraits of the wounded.
An Army weatherman in Greenland whose forecasts shape the war.
Navy Captain Robert Parsons builds a haven in the Pacific war.
A hotshot fighter pilot chafes at his reconnaissance assignment.
A wartime marriage endures the strain of long separations.
Judge Roy Bean, the self-styled law west of the Pecos.
Small-town life revolves around the telephone party line.
The Army deploys the new insecticide DDT to fight disease.
A day with a crew of combat cargo flyers.
Two American soldiers escape a German prison camp in occupied France.
Nellie Bly, the daredevil reporter who raced around the world.
The long conquest of epidemic disease.
How the Army Air Forces grew into a mighty force.
The hunt for a hidden Nazi radio transmitter.
A returning soldier becomes a stranger to his own children.
A returning veteran finds healing through a war orphan and his hometown.
Superstition grips the crew of the submarine USS Seawolf.
The Roeblings and the building of the Brooklyn Bridge.
A Montana cowboy turned sailor can't bear to leave his horse behind.
A Navy civilian helps develop a new guidance device.
The tender story of children's poet Eugene Field.
A whimsical Christmas tour of America's oddly named towns.
1946
James J. Andrews and his daring Union raid deep in the Confederacy.
The Army's strange experiment using camels in the cavalry.
The Army's postwar college at Camp Kilmer helps GIs start over.
Showboat performer Billy Bryant's life on the Mississippi.
Lincoln shares a quiet moment with a wounded Confederate officer.
Young Major Washington carries an ultimatum into the wilderness.
A couple builds a new life in the early days of Texas.
Edwin Drake and the drilling of America's first oil well.
The bush pilots opening up the Alaskan frontier.
A bitter veteran at a lonely lighthouse is won over by a stray dog.
A circus widow remembers the sawdust life of long ago.
John McGraw, the fiery manager of the New York Giants.
The comic misadventures of a Brooklyn GI, Artie Greengroin.
Molly Brown, the rough-and-tumble survivor of the Titanic.
The path of a giant storm and the havoc it leaves behind.
Euphemia Prescott brings law and order to a frontier town.
A couple's life running a Navajo trading post in the Southwest.
A romance set in the pioneering early days of the automobile.
A young veteran juggles college, marriage, and a baby on the GI Bill.
Mordecai Noah, the American consul who freed captives in Algiers.
A tall tale of a boastful old canal-barge captain.
A lyrical tribute to all that America means to those who seek it.
An immigrant doctor's devotion to healing in early America.
A tribute to America's truck drivers, and one woman among them.
Benjamin Franklin the soldier, during the French and Indian War.
A deckhand rises to command on the old Fall River steamship line.
Young Johnny Sager leads his orphaned siblings west by wagon train.
Dr. Chevalier Jackson and the instrument that saved choking children.
Elizabeth Jackson, the patriot mother of Andrew Jackson.
Revolutionary sea raider Gustavus Conyngham harries the British.
The Flying Tigers trade combat for the perilous Hump airlift.
Adolph Ochs and the making of The New York Times.
The quiet wisdom of a small-town country lawyer.
A Pinkerton detective cracks a year-old bank robbery and murder.
Anna Zenger's fight for a free press against a tyrannical governor.
Maud Powell, the violinist who won a place for American women in music.
A meteorologist takes on the frauds of the rainmaking trade.
1947
Charles Harvey, engineer of New York's first elevated railway.
A boy's chance at a cure through the promise of modern medicine.
Josiah White, the ironmaster whose grand failure built an industry.
A centennial tribute recalling the early triumphs of Thomas Edison.
Gustave Marsh's determined effort to build a trail up Mount Whitney.
Abigail Adams, the first First Lady to live in the White House.
George Pullman and the invention of the railroad sleeping car.
The discovery of the Rh factor and its surprising meaning in blood.
Luther Burbank, the horticultural wizard with green fingers.
William Seward, the rival who became Lincoln's loyal Secretary of State.
Lawman Wyatt Earp cleans up a rowdy Kansas cattle town.
Richard Loper, the Stonington shipbuilder and sea captain.
Amadeo Obici, the immigrant who founded Planters Peanuts.
Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse brings smallpox vaccination to America, backed by Jefferson.
Ann Robertson, a pioneer settler and teacher in the Cumberland Valley.
A detective stalks a suspected triple murderer.
Immigrant Joseph Pulitzer and the making of modern journalism.
Young lawyer Abraham Lincoln defends an innocent boy by moonlight.
How a kindly circus clown helped a future congressman find his footing.
M. Carey Thomas, the crusading president of Bryn Mawr College.
Scientist Alice Evans and her lonely fight against undulant fever.
Lieutenant Rowan carries his famous message through the Cuban jungle.
Fannie Farmer, who brought science to the American kitchen.
John Quincy Adams's second act as a fighting congressman.
Belva Lockwood, the suffragist who ran for president.
The life of baseball's Sultan of Swat, Babe Ruth.
Judge Jim West and the fight for a juvenile justice system.
Eliphalet Remington and the forging of an American gunmaking dynasty.
Millard Fillmore's unexpected rise to the presidency.
The early, restless life of naval hero John Paul Jones.
Suffragist leader Carrie Chapman Catt carries on the cause.
Dr. Bailey Ashford conquers the hookworm plague of Puerto Rico.
Fielding Hurry Up Yost, the legendary Michigan football coach.
A charming, humorous look at America's pilgrim spirit.
John Wesley Powell's daring first voyage down the Colorado River.
Astronomer Maria Mitchell and her discovery in the night sky.
An orphaned boy fights to keep his five younger siblings together.
A Christmas concert by the DuPont Chorus from Wilmington.
Pocahontas, who saved the life of Captain John Smith.
1948
A Chief Justice of the United States and the lady who changes his life.
Young Theodore Roosevelt as a rancher and lawman in the Dakota Badlands.
An aging schoolteacher faces the end of her beloved career.
A fateful night as Abraham Lincoln goes to the theater.
The comic awakening of a mild-mannered exterminator, Charlie Pomerantz.
The immigrant scientist Michael Pupin and his work with X-rays.
A Texas farm boy battles the Dust Bowl storms of the Depression.
Nurse Clara Maass gives her life to the fight against yellow fever.
Ellen Swallow Richards, a pioneering woman of American science.
Dr. Samuel Bard, the physician who saved President Washington's life.
President Grover Cleveland's White House courtship of young Frances Folsom.
Rebecca Lukens, the first woman to run an American iron mill.
A fantasy journey aboard the postwar Freedom Train.
A dramatization saluting the founding spirit of Rutgers University.
Robert E. Lee's quiet years as a college president after the Civil War.
Author Washington Irving and the legends of the Hudson Valley.
A research doctor trades the laboratory for life as a country physician.
Harriet Pullen, the widow who built a hotel empire in gold-rush Alaska.
Benjamin Silliman, Yale's first professor of chemistry.
The fight against leprosy, told through a soldier of the Spanish-American War.
Frederic Remington, the artist who captured the vanishing Old West.
A 1910 Chautauqua day and the oratory of William Jennings Bryan.
Grace Moore's rise from a church choir to the Metropolitan Opera.
A tribute to the Williamsburg pageant of America's founding ideals.
Louisa May Alcott and the one great romance of her life.
A centennial history of the Associated Press.
The battle of Gettysburg, seen through a soldier's eyes.
Varina Howell, who fell in love with and married Jefferson Davis.
A dramatic incident set at Niagara Falls.
Lieutenant Hobson's daring mission to bottle up the Spanish fleet at Santiago.
Andrew Jackson comes home at last to the Hermitage.
Jack Jouett's midnight ride to save Thomas Jefferson from capture.
Prudence Potter and the frontier women who defended Bryant's Station.
The mutiny in the ranks of Mad Anthony Wayne's Continental troops.
Dr. Samuel Mudd, imprisoned for treating Lincoln's assassin.
Booker T. Washington and the founding of the Tuskegee Institute.
Peggy Shippen and Benedict Arnold's road to treason.
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and his discovery of the cause of childbed fever.
The theatrical dynasty of actor Otis Skinner and his family.
December 20, 1948
The Du Pont Chorus
Eliza Lucas Pinckney and the birth of the South Carolina indigo trade.
1949
Johnny Appleseed spreads his orchards and kindness across the frontier.
Thomas Jefferson champions smallpox vaccination at Monticello.
The secret surgery that saved a stricken President Cleveland.
An American's part in a daring plot to rescue Marie Antoinette.
Benjamin Franklin plays matchmaker for the painter Benjamin West.
Young Abe Lincoln's failed venture as a frontier storekeeper.
The tender courtship of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody.
Captain Robert Stobo, an unsung hero of the French and Indian War.
February 28, 1949
Pink Lace
Dorothea Dix and her crusade for humane care of the mentally ill.
A father's frantic search for his wounded soldier son after Antietam.
March 21, 1949
Letter from Europe
An unwanted little boy searches for a family to call his own.
A celebration of an immigrant mother who becomes an American citizen.
Sarah Polk, the former first lady, plays matchmaker at Belmont.
An honest immigrant takes on a crooked ward politician.
Elizabeth Monroe's brave mission in Revolutionary France.
Jane McKimmon and the rural home-demonstration movement.
Sculptor Daniel Chester French and his Minute Man and Lincoln statues.
Lydia Darragh, the Quaker housewife who spied for Washington.
Anna Ella Carroll and the Tennessee Plan that helped win the Civil War.
The capture of Fort Ticonderoga and a reluctant patriot's stand.
Reformer Jacob Riis wins Theodore Roosevelt to the cause of the poor.
The beloved American actor Joseph Jefferson.
Scott Davis, the Deadwood stagecoach guard who outfaced the road agents.
A Chinese-American restaurateur's homecoming in New York.
Hiram Sibley and the building of the first transcontinental telegraph.
Christopher Ludwick, the patriot baker of the Revolution.
A stubborn man defends his right to wear a beard against a hostile town.
Jane Swisshelm, the fearless abolitionist editor of frontier Minnesota.
Blacksmith Thomas Davenport, the forgotten inventor of the electric motor.
Margaret Brent, colonial Maryland's first woman leader.
The formative youth of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
John Peter and Anna Zenger's landmark stand for a free press.
A disabled veteran finds new purpose as an underwater lumberjack.
A common man's fight for liberty in Revolutionary America.
Revolutionary spy Robert Townsend, torn between grief and duty.
A British spy who risks everything for love in America.
November 22, 1949
US Pilgrims
Anthony Lucas and the Spindletop gusher that launched the Texas oil boom.
Marie Hays Heiner, who broke through the silence of sudden deafness.
An adventure of the early American discovery of Antarctica.
December 20, 1949
The Du Pont Chorus
Lew Reese, who built an Ohio pottery works from nothing.
1950
Benjamin Franklin matches wits in a famous meeting of the Revolution.
Confederate boy-spy Sam Davis, honor bound to his cause.
Nell Donnelly, who built a Kansas City dressmaking empire.
Eli Whitney turns from the cotton gin to muskets and mass production.
The birth of American fire insurance amid a great city blaze.
A selection of great American prose and poetry, from Whitman to Sandburg.
Two young Georgians turn worn-out cotton fields into opportunity.
The darkest days of the Revolution at Valley Forge.
Immigrant inventor Joe Gerber and his simple, world-changing idea.
Painter Charles Willson Peale and his pioneering natural history museum.
Theodore Judah and his obsessive dream of a transcontinental railroad.
The Peabody sisters of Salem and Mary's search for love.
A WWII tank crew inspired by the ghost of cavalry raider Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Six momentous days in the life of a Confederate battlefield doctor.
Nathan Straus and his crusade for pasteurized milk to save children.
Rose Knox, who ran the Knox Gelatine company for forty years.
William Mahone, the determined engineer who bridged Virginia's swamps by rail.
Lee Underwood and the building of the American food-canning business.
May 9, 1950
Never Marry a Ranger
George Rogers Clark, conqueror of the Northwest and founder of Louisville.
A portrait of Thomas Jefferson and the great loves of his life.
Young Vinnie Ream, the sculptor who won the right to model Lincoln.
Dr. Henry Rose Carter and the long fight against yellow fever.
Lottie Moon, the beautiful Confederate spy, and her redemption.
General Glancy's humane effort to build a hospital for the needy.
A young immigrant girl finds her voice speaking for democracy.
John Adams defends the British soldiers of the Boston Massacre.
The discovery of a mountain of iron ore in the Venezuelan jungle.
Frederic Tudor, the Ice King who shipped New England ice around the world.
Cyrus McCormick and the reaper that transformed American farming.
Deborah Sampson, who disguised herself as a man to fight in the Revolution.
A family weathers the Depression by going into the furniture business.
The heroic story of a devoted nurse named Emma.
Dr. William Burton and the cracking process that doubled America's gasoline.
Mary Anderson, the young stage star who charmed America.
Eliza McCardle, who taught and married the tailor Andrew Johnson.
Eliphalet Dennison and the paper-goods company he built.
Dr. J. Marion Sims and the founding of the first women's hospital.
The Pilgrims and the signing of the Mayflower Compact.
Winnie Davis, the Confederacy's Daughter, and her forbidden romance.
Pierre L'Enfant and his grand design for the city of Washington.
A young Lieutenant Ulysses Grant in love.
A Christmas concert by the DuPont Chorus.
A Union spy's perilous mission around the battle of Chickamauga.
1951
January 2, 1951
An American from France
A fiftieth-anniversary tribute to the Spindletop oil gusher at Beaumont.
The military genius of Stonewall Jackson.
Charles Martin Hall, who unlocked cheap aluminum at twenty-two.
A collection of lesser-known stories about Abraham Lincoln.
Editor Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune scores a big scoop.
The invention of nylon in the DuPont laboratories.
Mary Murray, whose hospitality helped Washington's army slip past the British.
Samuel Mulford, the cantankerous colonist who fought a tax on whaling.
The Faith Cabin Libraries that brought books to the rural South.
Ellsworth Statler's rise from bellhop to hotel magnate.
Tristram Coffin, the would-be king of colonial Nantucket.
Christopher Sholes and the invention of the typewriter.
A tiny Martha's Vineyard newspaper's determined fight to publish.
Naval hero Commodore David Porter and his valiant losing fight.
Abigail Scott Duniway's fight for woman suffrage in the Northwest.
Eddie Rickenbacker's ordeal adrift on a Pacific life raft.
The time young Abraham Lincoln nearly fought a duel.
Annie Goodrich, who raised the standards of American nursing.
General Mark Clark's secret submarine rendezvous in North Africa.
Nathaniel Bacon, the rebel who defied colonial Virginia a century early.
John Brashear, the workingman who ground lenses to study the stars.
Jade Snow Wong and her coming of age in Chinese-American San Francisco.
Conductor Theodore Thomas, who brought orchestral music to America.
A combat soldier's story, echoing the spirit of the Liberty Bell.
How Corporal James Slayton earned the Medal of Honor.
Army doctors confront the hidden wounds of battle fatigue.
Julia Ward Howe and the writing of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
Dr. Norman Bethune and the invention of the mobile blood bank.
Dr. Benjamin Duggar's discovery of the wonder drug Aureomycin at seventy.
Washington and the army at their lowest ebb at Valley Forge.
Young Abraham Lincoln and his first love, Ann Rutledge.
A Christmas concert by the DuPont Chorus.
An orphaned boy fights to keep his five younger siblings together.
1952
A poor Black family, one generation out of slavery, pulls together.
Reformer Tom Osborne goes undercover as a convict to change the prisons.
Janet Roper, Mother of the Seas, and her mission to lost sailors.
The young Marquis de Lafayette wins his commission in Washington's army.
The tense night Theodore Roosevelt secretly became president.
Congressman Matthew Lyon defies the Alien and Sedition Acts.
Lincoln's fateful peace meeting with Confederate Alexander Stephens.
Washington's Christmas gamble at Trenton: victory or death.
General Crawford Sams's secret medical mission behind enemy lines in Korea.
The tragic first marriage of young Lieutenant Jefferson Davis.
Cincinnatus Shryock, a resourceful ferryman on the Kentucky River.
The legend of Lou Diamond, the immortal fighting Marine.
Nancy Hart, the frontier woman who captured a band of Tories.
Herman Frasch and the process that unlocked America's sulfur.
Elisha Otis and the safety elevator that raised the modern city.
Eleuthere Irenee du Pont, the French immigrant who founded DuPont.
Spencer Kellogg Brown, a young Union spy imprisoned in the Confederacy.
An inventive tank commander devises a bold WWII breakthrough.
The early Swedish settlers of the Delaware valley.
Duty, Honor, Country: three great leaders of West Point.
Harriet Quimby, America's first licensed woman pilot.
David Bushnell and his Revolutionary War submarine, the Turtle.
The sorrow and controversy of Mary Todd Lincoln.
Finn Magnus, the Danish immigrant who invented the plastic harmonica.
Dr. Edward Squibb and the founding of his pharmaceutical company.
September 16, 1952
Man of Great Importance
Catherine Fay, who founded one of Ohio's first orphanages.
Five shipwrecked sailors fight to survive in an open boat.
A true Korean War combat rescue against the odds.
Jeremiah O'Brien and the first naval skirmish of the Revolution.
Alexander Hamilton's push for a battlefield command under Washington.
A young girl turns the tide when the rebels' plans are betrayed.
Horace Greeley's controversial fight to free Jefferson Davis after the war.
A daring WWII attempt to board and capture a Nazi submarine.
The history of the American Thanksgiving holiday.
December 2, 1952
A Thousand to One
Paul Revere, and all he did beyond his famous midnight ride.
American POWs find Christmas hope behind German barbed wire.
1953
Dr. Mary Walker, the Civil War surgeon who earned the Medal of Honor.
George Westinghouse and the air brake that made railroads safe.
A tour of the White House and the presidents who have lived there.
Vigilante justice in lawless Gold Rush San Francisco.
Navy nurse Ann Bernatitus and her escape from besieged Corregidor.
The wartime salvage of a massive sunken drydock in the Pacific.
Captain Allan McLane, daring scout of the Revolution.
Mark Twain's adventures as a Mississippi riverboat pilot.
A warm-hearted story of a little girl and a lawman's star.
Two of Washington's spies race to save the French fleet.
Henry Shreve, the captain who tamed the Mississippi for steamboats.
William Dawes, the forgotten rider of Paul Revere's alarm.
Robert Livingston and the making of the Louisiana Purchase.
The Story
A prestige anthology of dramatized American history, Cavalcade of America brought biographies and tales of "humanitarian progress" to CBS in 1935 and then NBC, running all the way to 1953. Its unmistakable signature was a constraint: sponsor DuPont banned every depiction of violence -- no gunfire, no brutality -- so the whole house style tilted toward uplift, achievement, and the quiet drama of human endeavor, scored throughout by the Don Voorhees orchestra. The no-violence brief had an unexpected effect: it drew serious dramatists. A young Arthur Miller wrote for the show, alongside Norman Rosten, Maxwell Anderson, Stephen Vincent Benet, Carl Sandburg, and Robert E. Sherwood, while Yale historian Frank Monaghan and others vetted the facts. Each week a star carried the lead -- Burgess Meredith turned up as Amerigo Vespucci -- in high-budget, accuracy-checked historical drama. The irony ran deep: DuPont, branded a WWI "merchant of death," launched the series as corporate image repair under its motto "Better Things for Better Living... Through Chemistry." That tension is the show's lasting fascination -- a munitions giant's PR vehicle that became a magnet for anti-war playwrights and a national showcase for literary talent. As one of radio's longest-running and most respected historical anthologies, Cavalcade is studied today both as fine dramatic radio and as a textbook case of corporate-sponsored image management.
Full story — coming soon while it's being curated.
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