This mobility opened both literal and figurative vistas to countless Americans — and even if most weren’t able to drive to Haight-Ashbury, or explore the Far East in person, they certainly saw these places on television and in the great photography being published in myriad weekly and monthly magazines and, increasingly, in newspapers. Fewer than a million households owned a TV in the late 1940s; two decades later, that number had increased more than fortyfold.
The August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech; the immediate aftermath of JFK’s assassination (and MLK’s, and RFK’s); the Vietnam War; the 1969 moon landing — all of these era-defining people and moments, and so many more, were broadcast into living rooms from Maine to California, Alaska to Florida.
