August 11, 1984. President Ronald Reagan is at Rancho del Cielo, his beloved ranch in the Santa Barbara hills. It’s a Saturday morning. In a few minutes he’ll deliver his weekly radio address to the nation — this week’s topic: the Equal Access Act, a bill he’d just signed into law. The tech crew from…
It started before dawn. On August 3, 1981, roughly 13,000 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization — PATCO — walked off the job. Across the country, 7,000 flights were canceled. The nation’s air traffic system, already straining from chronic understaffing and aging equipment, suddenly had a massive hole in the middle of it….
The 1984 Olympics boycott began on May 8, 1984, when the Soviet Union announced it would skip the Los Angeles Summer Games — a Cold War retaliation that pulled fifteen Eastern Bloc nations and four allies out of competition just eleven weeks before the opening ceremony. The walkout was the largest Olympic boycott since 1980,…
In 1981, Reagan’s FCC deregulated children’s TV and accidentally created the greatest era of cartoons ever. He-Man, Transformers, G.I. Joe, ThunderCats — every iconic 80s cartoon was a 22-minute toy commercial made possible by one policy change.
Forty-five years ago today, on March 30, 1981, the United States came terrifyingly close to losing its 40th president. At 2:27 p.m. on a gray Washington afternoon, six shots rang out on a sidewalk outside the Washington Hilton Hotel — and within seconds, the most powerful man on earth was bleeding in the back of…
President Reagan addresses the nation from the Oval Office on March 23, 1983, unveiling his ambitious Strategic Defense Initiative. On March 23, 1983, President Ronald Reagan sat behind his desk in the Oval Office and delivered a televised address that would reshape the Cold War, terrify the Soviet Union, and earn one of the most…
