The Library of American Broadcasting Foundation (LABF) Presents the 2025 Broadcast Historian Award to Gold Dust on the Air: Television Anthology Drama and Midcentury American Culture by Molly Schneider, Columbia College Chicago
Washington, D.C. – The Library of American Broadcasting Foundation (LABF) is pleased to announce the winner of its 2025 Broadcast Historian Award is Molly Schneider, Columbia College Chicago, for her book, Gold Dust on the Air: Television Anthology Drama and Midcentury American Culture.
From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, anthology dramas presented “quality” television programming in weekly stand-alone television plays meant to entertain and provide cultural uplift to American society. Programs such as Playhouse 90, Studio One, and The Twilight Zone became important emblems of American creative potential on television. But their propensity for addressing matters of major social concern also meant that they often courted controversy. Although the anthology’s tenure would be brief, its importance in the television landscape would be great, and the ways the format negotiated ideas about “Americanness” at midcentury would be a crucial facet of its significance.
In Gold Dust on the Air (University of Texas Press), Schneider traces a cultural history of the “Golden Age” anthology, addressing topics such as the format’s association with Method acting and debates about “authentic” American experience, its engagement with ideas about “conformity” in the context of Cold War pressures, and its depictions of war in a medium sponsored by defense contractors. Drawing on archival research, deep textual examination, and scholarship on both television history and broader American culture, Schneider posits the anthology series as a site of struggle over national meaning.
Molly Schneider is a television historian and an Associate Professor in the School of Film and Television at Columbia College Chicago. Her research focuses on midcentury television anthology dramas in the United States, as well as more contemporary programming in the realms of anthologies, miniseries, and limited series. She combines an interest in broadcast history and archives with an interest in the cultural-political discourses that surround media texts and industries.
In addition to her book Gold Dust on the Air, Schneider’s work has appeared in publications such as Journal of Film and Video and New Review of Film and Television Studies, as well as the edited anthology The Many Lives of The Twilight Zone (2022). She has been featured as an invited expert by institutions such as the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and she has also been interviewed for television, podcasts, and radio, including for the BBC Radio documentary You’re Entering Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone (2019).
The LABF supports a broadcast archive housed at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland. Schneider has graciously agreed to donate a copy of her book to the archives. She will receive a $2,500 check in recognition of the award.
In 2015 LABF and BEA partnered to establish the annual Broadcast Historian Awards. With the support of LABF, BEA annually provides two $2,500 awards to educators who have published books or produced creative work specifically related to broadcast history. A call for the 2025 Broadcast Historian Awards will be available in early summer. For more information, visit www.BEAweb.org.
About BEA – The Broadcast Education Association is the professional association for professors, industry professionals and graduate students interested in teaching and research related to electronic media and multimedia enterprises. There are currently more than 2,500 individual and institutional members worldwide. Visit www.beaweb.org for more information.
About the LABF: The Library of American Broadcasting Foundation serves the philanthropic arm of the Library of American Broadcasting, the nation’s most extensive collection of broadcast history, policy and tradition, including historical documents, professional papers, oral and video histories, books, scripts and photographs preserved at the University of Maryland. In addition, the LABF presents the Annual Giants of Broadcasting Event, which pays tribute to trailblazers in the radio and television industry. For more information, please visit www.tvradiolibrary.org.