Stories From The Stacks

American educators in 1940s classrooms eagerly played corporate propaganda for their students. The source, Dupont’s Cavalcade of America, was a mid-twentieth century radio program designed to promote the values of free enterprise, productivity, & consumerism to the public through the medium of historical drama. Teachers introduced the program to classrooms to supplement lessons in the American past, and its fair historical accuracy made it potentially useful as a teaching tool. However, the program came with a heavy dose of messaging meant to promote a “liberal consensus” of corporate and government unity and competency in the face of social and political challenges. In this episode of Stories from the Stacks, Taylor Currie, graduate student at Queen’s University, discusses how she approached her project, how she discovered her source base at Hagley, and how she interprets the material to suit her research agenda. Attempting to trace the long history of what she terms the “project of liberal consensus,” C