Moses Yale Beach | His Time & Ours
Channel: WPAA-TV and Community Media Center
Date: 2022-11-28

A guided conversation about Wallingford CT native son, Moses Yale Beach, whose contributions to the world are mostly unsung. Among his contributions is the founding of the Associated Press.

Today we are speaking with Valerie Komor, Director of Corporate Archives at the Associated Press, and Professors of American History Menahem Blondheim (joining us from Israel) and Robert E May (joining from Washington State.) 

To provide our viewers with some context, Moses Yale Beach was born in Wallingford CT on Jan 15, 1800, and died in 1868.  A man of many skills and innovations, his most successful venture involved the penny newspaper,  The Sun, from 1838 to 1858. He died approximately three years after Lincoln was assassinated while living in his mansion built by architect Henry Austin.

Our distinguished guests are experts in their respective fields and their contributions remain, increasingly so, relevant to our contemporary education regarding important events in history not always in the larger public awareness. This is but one reason why we are happy and honoured today to be joined by Director Komor and Professors Blondheim and May.

Professor Robert May, formerly of Purdue University and now retired, is a specialist in 19th-century American history and the author of, among others, Manifest Destiny's Underworld,  The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, Slavery, Race, and Conquest in the Tropics: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Future of Latin America and Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas, and Public Memory. 

His works contribute renewed understanding of and interventions to knowledge about 19th-century American Western expansion. In so doing, Professor May’s work alters and enhances our understanding of Manifest Destiny, Underground Railroads and other important focus topics 
affixed to the Antebellum and beyond, and Professor May’s recent writing continues to explore the necessity of intervention in nationwide education curriculums.

Professor Menahem Blondheim is a faculty member in the Department of Communication and Journalism and the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 
His research explores the role of communication in American and in Jewish history, as well as the history of media. A former entrepreneur and executive in the high-tech industry in the dawn of high-speed digital communications, he also studies the development, performance, and meaning of communication technologies, new and old. He has received his BA degree from the Hebrew University, MA and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University, and has won fellowships from the NEH, Smithsonian Institution, Library of Congress, and the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Blondheim’s extensive work in communication and communication histories is, for our purposes, fascinatingly presented in his book, News Over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844—1897.