It's the Brian Larry Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone.

Now we continue our WNYC Centennial series, 100 years of 100 things.

And for this day before election day, it's thing number 36, 100 years and more, of

watching election returns. Once upon a time, there was no such thing as television, obviously. So how did

people used to do it? And how did the modern media change our relationship to and expectations about learning the results?

Our guest for this is Catherine Kramer Brownell, director of the Center for American Political History and Technology at Purdue University,

and author of the book 24-7 Politics, Cable Television, and the Fragmenting of America

from Watergate to Fox News, which came out last year. She also wrote an article in the Washington

Post just before the 2020 election called Good TV Demands Results on Election Night,

but that's bad for democracy. Professor Brownell, thanks for joining our

100 Years of 100 Things series. Welcome to WNYC. Thanks so much for having me. And let's start

more than 100 years ago. You write that in the 19th century, voters looked for election

night rockets that might communicate to voters the local tally. What does that mean? Election

Night Rockets. Well, it really conveys how party politics worked in the 19th century, especially

in the antebellum period. Parties controlled all aspects of public life even. Newspapers were partisan outlets. Parties controlled the ballots.

They actually, there was no secret ballot or secret voting. So they gave people a ballots that

they would then march to deposit in. And they controlled how people found out about the results.

They were in charge of calculating the results.

And they really turned the election day experience into this social event, a civil ritual,

where people could enjoy themselves, but also be firmly enmeshed in party politics.

And so election night rockets were one way you know, one way of kind of one type of civic ritual. But it really is reflective of elections and party politics

more broadly as this broader social experience in the 19th century. And in terms of the media, somehow this was in the context of newspapers,

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