Jump to content
Main menu
Main menu
move to sidebar
hide
Navigation
Main page
Recent changes
Random page
Help about MediaWiki
Special pages
Niidae Wiki
Search
Search
Appearance
Create account
Log in
Personal tools
Create account
Log in
Pages for logged out editors
learn more
Contributions
Talk
Editing
Alistair Cooke
(section)
Page
Discussion
English
Read
Edit
View history
Tools
Tools
move to sidebar
hide
Actions
Read
Edit
View history
General
What links here
Related changes
Page information
Appearance
move to sidebar
hide
Warning:
You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you
log in
or
create an account
, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.
Anti-spam check. Do
not
fill this in!
===Move to the United States=== Cooke stated that, on a visit to New York in 1936, he'd been impressed at how freely newspapers and journals were able to report on the abdication crisis whilst all comment was still censored in London. Very soon, in 1937, he immigrated. He became a United States citizen and swore the Oath of Allegiance on 1 December 1941, six days before [[Pearl Harbor]] was attacked. Shortly after immigrating, Cooke suggested to the BBC the idea of doing the ''London Letter'' in reverse: a 15-minute talk for British listeners on life in America. A prototype, ''Mainly About [[Manhattan]]'', was broadcast intermittently from 1938, but the idea was shelved with the outbreak of [[World War II]] in 1939. During this time, as well, Cooke undertook a journey through the whole United States, recording the lifestyle of ordinary Americans during the war and their reactions to it. The manuscript was published as ''The American Home Front: 1941β1942'' in the United States (and as ''Alistair Cooke's American Journey: Life on the Home Front in the Second World War'' in the UK) in 2006. The first ''American Letter'' was broadcast on 24 March 1946 (Cooke said this was at the request of Lindsey Wellington, the BBC's New York Controller); the series was initially commissioned for only 13 instalments. The series came to an end 58 years later in March 2004, after 2,869 instalments and less than a month before Cooke's death. Along the way, it picked up a new name (changing from ''American Letter'' to ''[[Letter from America]]'' in 1950) and an enormous audience, being broadcast not only in Britain and in many other [[Commonwealth of Nations|Commonwealth]] countries, but throughout the world by the [[BBC World Service]].
Summary:
Please note that all contributions to Niidae Wiki may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here.
You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see
Encyclopedia:Copyrights
for details).
Do not submit copyrighted work without permission!
Cancel
Editing help
(opens in new window)
Search
Search
Editing
Alistair Cooke
(section)
Add topic