This week TIME launches a new kind of radio program for you.

It is called "The World and America"--and right from the start it will be broadcast over 19 stations from Portland, Maine, to Honolulu.

No one has ever tried to do the job "The World and America" does in quite the way this program does it. In a series of 52 broadcasts, it aims to teach U.S. history by letting you eavesdrop on the conversation of two everyday Americans who like the sort of country they live in and want to find out how it got that way.

We have been working on this series for over a year now--and for the past three months our experimental broadcasts over Manhattan Radio Station WQXR have been bringing in highly enthusiastic comments from educators and listeners alike. For example. Professor William Ernest Hocking of Harvard wrote: "I have been learning a lot of history from this broadcast. It's the setting up of the wide chessboard that's so fascinating. Many thanks for the fun, and a new look at things." And Winifred Fisher, Executive Director of the New York Adult Education Council, passed on a comment Dean Langmuir, investment counselor and brother of the electrical Irving, recently made to her. " 'The World and America' is perfectly wonderful," he said. "I wouldn't miss it for anything. I ought to know these things but I don't, or if I ever knew them I've forgotten them."

This new project is the work of the Radio Programs Department we set up back in August, 1942 under Frank Norris, who has been with TIME since 1929, first as a writer, later as a managing editor, since 1941 Managing Editor of the Radio MARCH OF TIME. Working with him is a large staff that includes an editor, two directors, three researchers, a full-time Washington correspondent and eight writers. One of these writers is John McNulty, whose short stories you may have read in other magazines--another is Carl Carmer, professor, reporter, magazine editor, who has traveled through every state of the Union gathering material for his famous bestsellers: Stars Fell on Alabama, The Hudson, The Hurricane's Children, Listen for a Lonesome Drum.

"The World and America" is just one of the new ideas this team has developed. For instance, there's "Let's Learn Spanish," radio's first major attempt to teach Americans a foreign language, broadcast so far over 63 stations in 31 states. There is our South-of-the -Border program, "Aprendamos Ingles," created to help Spanish-speaking people learn English painlessly. (More than 70 stations in 17 Latin American countries are broadcasting this program.) And then there is "TIME Views the News," which brings listeners the exclusive news reports that come to TIME every day from our own correspondents in every corner of the globe (these newscasts are sponsored by the Welch Grape Juice Co. over 188 Blue Network stations).

"The World and America" (and each of our other programs) tries to do with the spoken word the same job TIME does with the printed word: get important information into the heads of busy, intelligent Americans--and make it stick.

And make it interesting too! For we think you will have a good time letting this new radio series tell you things you never knew before about the history of our country. And so I am listing below the stations already scheduled to carry this program. I hope you will plan to tune in on one of them.

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