Story of All of Us
What the Show Did
Story of All of Us arrived on radio in the spring of 1940 with a straightforward but ambitious premise: take the sweep of ancient human history — the Greeks, the Persians, the Phoenicians, Rome — and turn it into something a listener could actually feel connected to. The series ran from March 10 through June 30, 1940, a compact four-month run that produced at least twelve episodes. The format blended education and entertainment, building each installment around relatable narratives rather than dry recitation of dates and dynasties. The goal was to make the past feel inhabited, not merely catalogued.
The civilizations the show covered were overwhelmingly pre-common-era: ancient Greece and its legends, the Medes and the Persians, Nineveh and the Assyrians, the Phoenicians, Rome, and the world at the time of Homer and the biblical David. That's a remarkable breadth for a short run. Rather than marching through a single civilization across multiple weeks, the series moved from culture to culture, giving listeners a panoramic view of the ancient world and the people who lived in it. For a 1940 audience, much of this was material that lived in textbooks and Sunday school but rarely on the dial — and the show's choice to dramatize it suggests producers who believed ordinary listeners would meet them halfway.
What Survives
Twelve episodes are documented, and the episode titles give a clear picture of what the series covered. Greeks and Their Legends and Medes and The Persians suggest the kind of civilizational portraits the show favored. Ninevah points to the Assyrian empire at its height. Phonicians would have touched on the maritime traders who spread alphabet writing across the Mediterranean. All Roads Lead To Rome has a title that signals familiar territory given a fresh angle, and World At Time Of Homer - David is one of the more unusual pairings in old-time radio — yoking the Greek poet to the Hebrew king as a way of placing listeners at a single moment across two cultures.
Two episodes carried the title Reprise Of Past Stories, which tells us the producers built at least one recap installment into the run. That was common practice for sustaining or lower-budget radio programs in this era, where re-summarizing earlier material helped fill the schedule and served listeners who had missed earlier weeks. And What World Be With No People has the feel of a philosophical capstone — a step back from specific civilizations to ask what the study of human history is actually for. It's the kind of title that signals the show wasn't content to simply parade empires past the microphone; somewhere in the writing, there was a thesis trying to assemble itself.
A Show Ahead of Its Genre
Story of All of Us is notable partly because of what came after it. The genre it worked in — narrative-driven, dramatized history for a general radio audience — went on to produce some of the most memorable programming of the 1940s and 1950s, but those programs mostly postdate this one. Adventures in Research, a Westinghouse-sponsored series written by physicist Dr. Phillips Thomas that dramatized scientific discoveries, didn't begin broadcasting until 1942. You Are There — originally called CBS Is There — debuted on CBS Radio on July 7, 1947, seven years after Story of All of Us ended its run, and brought a newsroom-style format to historical events in a way that earned a large and devoted following.
That timing matters. Story of All of Us wasn't riding a wave of proven, similar programming — it was part of the earlier current that helped prove the format had an audience. Its storytelling approach was noted as influencing similar programs that followed, which is a reasonable claim given the genre's trajectory through the decade. By the time You Are There was placing reporters at the assassination of Caesar, the basic idea that ancient history could carry a radio audience had already been tested in shows like this one.
What We Don't Know
The show is, by any honest measure, an obscure program. No dedicated encyclopedia entry and no certified researcher's set for Story of All of Us has turned up in available sources, and the network it aired on and the sponsor behind it remain unconfirmed. During this period, much radio programming was conceived and controlled by advertising agencies that hired talent and leased airtime from networks, but who exactly backed this particular series is unknown. The host, the writer, the producer — none of that information has surfaced.
What survives is the twelve-episode catalog and the episode titles, which are themselves more informative than they might seem at first glance. A show that chose Ninevah and Phonicians as subjects in 1940 was reaching past the obvious material — past Greece and Rome as commonly taught — toward civilizations that general audiences of the era would have had less exposure to. That suggests some real ambition in the programming, even if the people behind it have faded from the record. Whoever wrote and produced Story of All of Us was working in a format that wouldn't fully come into its own for another half-decade, and they were doing it without the template that later shows would inherit. The result is a small, mostly anonymous run of episodes that nonetheless sits at the front edge of one of radio's quieter traditions.