Hearst, Politics, and the Media
David Nasaw Discusses his Award-Winning Biography
A notoriously complicated 
and enigmatic figure, William Randolph Hearst is the original media mogul, building an empire that included newspapers, magazines, radio stations, a film studio, and newsreels. When Professor David Nasaw, former Executive Officer of the Ph.D. Program in History and Director of the Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, decided to write Hearst's biography, he knew he had his work cut out for him: How to humanize a larger-than-life man who played a monumental role in forging the modern culture of communication and entertainment in the United States? More >
The Culture of Hollywood
The work of George Custen, Professor 
of Theatre and Coordinator of the Film Studies Program at The Graduate Center, whose research on the culture of Hollywood includes the books Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (Rutgers University Press, 1992) and Twentieth Century's Fox: Darryl Zanuck and the Culture of Hollywood (Basic Books, 1997), helps to explain Hollywood history--its specificity, changes, and developments--focusing on the period from 1930 to 1960.
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Finding Your Way Around The Lost Museum
Thanks to The Graduate Center's New Media Lab (which operates under the aegis of the Center for Media and Learning), Barnum's P.T. Barnum's American Museum, one of the premier destinations in 19th-century New York--part zoo, part lecture hall, part freak show--is once again open for business, albeit in the virtual environs of the World WideWeb at http://web.gc.cuny.edu/ashp/lostmuseum/. "One hundred thirty-five years after the Museum burned down, there's still tremendous interest in it, as well as in Barnum's personality and in the way he mixed information and entertainment," says Joshua Brown, director of the Center for Media and Learning.
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