Marion Stokes was secretly recording American television twenty-four hours a day for thirty years. It started in 1979 with the Iranian Hostage Crisis at the dawn of the twenty-four-hour news cycle. It ended on December 14, 2012 while the Sandy Hook massacre played on television as Marion passed away. In between, Marion recorded on 70,000 VHS tapes, capturing revolutions, lies, wars, triumphs, catastrophes, bloopers, talk shows, and commercials that told us who we were, and show how television shaped the world of today. <p> A mystery in the form of a time capsule, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project delves into the strange life of a radical Communist activist who became a fabulously wealthy and reclusive archivist. Marion's work was crazy but it was also genius, and she would pay a profound price for dedicating her life to this visionary and maddening project.