Among the eminent broadcast journalists of his generation, Studs Terkel may well stand alone in his consistent compassion for lesbian and gay people and curiosity about their lives. During the forty-six years that his program ran on WFMT radio, there was no Ellen Degeneres, no Anderson Cooper, and no Laverne Cox. Yet Terkel interviewed numerous gay activists, artists, and writers—and the arc of those these broadcasts, between the early 1960s and the early 1980s, offers a powerfully compelling portrait in sound of the emergence of gay visibility in America.

The many ways that British and American societies have inspired and influenced one another in the 20th century was a topic that Studs Terkel explored with great gusto and curiosity.

Terkel's celebrated 1970 book 'Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression' represents a pinnacle of documentation of what it meant to live through the most severe economic disaster of the 20th century in America.

Terkel understood Italy as few foreigners have and when he first traveled there in 1962 to collect his Prix Italia prize for the celebrated radio documentary Born To Live.

One of the most profound categories of the Terkel archive is the collection of conversations with novelists and short story writers.

It is all too easy now to dismiss what a profound enigma and anxiety the Soviet Union was for ordinary Americans from the 1950s to the 1990s.

"The scientist just like the artist is filled with leaps of the imagination, it is not a pedestrian kind of discovery the scientist makes... speak of the unity of hidden likenesses..." so begins Terkel's interview (paraphrasing Coleridge) with science historian Jacob Bronowski in 1962.

Today, most Americans have a pretty narrow definition of the labor movement and what it means to be working class. If you ask, they might mention steelworkers, miners, and construction workers, which implicitly presumes that only white men (generally assumed to be conservative) were and are the only ones to be found in the country’s blue-collar jobs and trade unions. Studs certainly talked to his share of steelworkers and miners. He even interviewed truckers, like Paul Dietsch, who had no interest in joining unions, disdained government regulations, and loved open roads as much as free enterprise.

This Memorial Day, check out some of the profound conversations about war the Studs Terkel Radio Archive has to offer.