Lori Rogers-Stokes, PhD
Martians! What the War of the Worlds Broadcast Tells Us about American Society on the Eve of WWII
The 1938 Orson Welles radio production of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds has gone down in history for causing a panic about a Martian invasion. Were people back then really so gullible? Or were there close connections between that story and the state of the world on the brink of another world war? We’ll explore the details of this amazing historical moment and the strong reaction it provoked and listen to some clips from the actual broadcast together.
Lori Rogers-Stokes, PhD, (lori.stokes@comcast.net | LinkedIn) is an independent scholar, public historian, and contributing editor for New England’s Hidden Histories, a digital history project making thousands of pages of colonial-era Congregational church records available through digitization and transcription. She is the author of Records of Trial from Thomas Shepard’s Church in Cambridge, 1638–49: Heroic Souls (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Lori studies the history of Woodland New England, particularly the founding decades of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, when Indigenous people and English colonizers took actions that continue to shape our lives today.
Learn more about New England’s Hidden Histories the digital project of the Congregational Library & Archives that digitizes and provides access to early New England Congregational church records here.
