The Trial of John Peter Zenger

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Lead: In the summer of 1735, the jury in the trial of New York publisher John Peter Zenger helped establish primary freedoms secured in the Constitution of the United States. 

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts. 

Content: In 1731 William Cosby was appointed colonial Royal Governor of New York. He quickly established a reputation as arrogant, greedy and corrupt. His popularity plummeted in part due to bitter criticism in the pages of The New York Journal. While much of impetus for this censure came from the financiers of the Journal who were part of an equally unscrupulous anti-Cosby faction in the city, the governor’s fury was directed at John Peter Zenger, the Journal’s publisher.

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FDR Friendly Conspiracy with the Press

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Lead: Few people knew that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a man of immense energy and enthusiasm, in the prime of life, was crippled by polio.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: FDR was an up-and-coming politician. He had been the Assistant Secretary of the Navy during World War I, received the Democrat nomination for Vice-president, campaigned vigorously with James M. Cox and with him was buried in the Republican landslide of 1920. Then a painful tragedy struck his life and interrupted his steady political assent. While vacationing on Canada's Campobello Island in August, 1921 he was stricken with a severe case of poliomyelitis, for a time was almost completely paralyzed, and lost the use of his legs.

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The Roosevelt Wedding

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Lead: In 1905 Franklin Delano Roosevelt married his cousin Eleanor. The guests almost ignored the bride and groom.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: Sara Roosevelt was a dominating mother. Hovering over her son, Franklin, Sara at nearly every stage attempted to rule his life with an iron hand. When Frank began his courtship of his cousin Eleanor, Sara put her foot down but her reasons were hard to argue. She could hardly object to the girl on social grounds. As a distant member of the family, Eleanor was orphaned and lived with relatives Manhattan as part of one of first families of New York. If that were not enough, she was the favorite niece of another cousin, President Theodore Roosevelt. Her objections were to their relatively young ages. He was 21, she, 19, and MaMa extracted a promise that the engagement had to be kept secret for a year.

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Frederic Douglass I

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Lead: "All the other speakers seemed tame after Frederick Douglass. He stood there like an African Prince, majestic in his wrath."Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: Elizabeth Cady Stanton knew her activists. It was an age of moral agitation and she would go on to great fame at the side of Susan B. Anthony in the service of women's rights. That day in the mid-1800s when Frederick Douglass spoke to an antislavery meeting in Boston, Stanton was as moved as the rest at the sound of his voice and the moral imperative of his message.

Douglass was an escaped slave. Raised by his grandmother on a Chesapeake Bay plantation, at the age of six he began his work under Captain Aaron Anthony, the white farm manager and, so some of the slaves said, Frederick's father. In later years, he would make vivid to audiences throughout the North the picture of life as a slave.

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Big Four of the Central Pacific Railroad II

PermalinkToday's AMIT
Lead: After failing to sell the stock necessary to build his dream, a transcontinental railroad, visionary engineer Theodore Dehone Judah met four shopkeepers who made his dream come true.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: After great disappointment in failing to raise the capital for the railroad, Judah was approached by four men and in a meeting above a hardware store they listened to his plan. The founders of the Central Pacific Railroad were a study in contrast.

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The Big Four of the Central Pacific Railroad I

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Lead: Above the hardware store on a cold January night, Theodore Dehone Judah met the four men who would make his dream come true.

Intro.: "A Moment in Time" with Dan Roberts.

Content: Judah had a vision. To span the Continental United States with a railroad. After brilliant success as an engineer in New York, Judah had been lured to California to build the first railroad on the West Coast. In doing so, he fell under the spell of the Sierra Nevada Mountains which piled up just east of his work cite in the Sacramento Valley. He soon found himself spending more and more of his free time roaming the Sierras on foot and muleback with his wife, doing preliminary surveys of the best railroad routes across the mountains. By November 1860, he had found what he thought was the best way across, established a company, issued stock, but found he could hardly give the shares away.

 

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First Ladies: Mary Todd Lincoln II

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Lead: Already the subject of much public abuse, Mary Lincoln began to come unglued with the death of the couple’s young son, William.

Intro: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts

Content: Not until Eleanor Roosevelt did a First Lady have to endure the carping of critics as did Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of the 16th President of the United States. She was vilified as being generous, stingy, energetic, retiring, patriotic and treasonous, all at the same time. But it was the death of her middle son, Willie, which set Mary Lincoln on the path to emotional disintegration. Willie contracted typhoid fever, and died in February 1862. Both of the Lincolns were shattered, but Mary seemed close to mental collapse. She had convulsions, stayed in bed for days, and began attending séances in hopes of making contact with him.

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First Ladies: Mary Todd Lincoln I

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Lead: Mary Lincoln was the first Presidential wife to be center of ill-deserved, widespread, and sometimes bitter controversy.

Intro: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts

Content: When Mary came with her husband to Washington, the city was gloomy with the prospect of civil war. Lincoln’s election in November had provoked the deep South to secession. She was hopeful that she and her husband might help reduce tension, but she was disappointed. Not until Eleanor Roosevelt was a First Lady subjected to the abuse Mary Lincoln was forced to endure.

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