Description
Book SynopsisAffirms the importance of invention of radio and explores how radio creates sets of overlapping communities of the air, including those who study and theorize radio as a technological, social, cultural, and historical phenomenon. This work explores radio's role in shaping Anglo-American culture and society since the early twentieth century.
Trade Review“
Communities of the Air covers historical periods, genres, performers, program types, and audiences not previously discussed in this still all too thin area of radio studies.“—Susan Jeanne Douglas, author of
Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination“Turn up the volume! At last, we’re tuned in to the right frequency for radio studies. We all listen to radio, we remember our lives through it—and now we have the tools to understand it too.“—Toby Miller, author of
Technologies of Truth: Cultural Citizenship and Popular MediaTable of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Communities of the Air: Introducing the Radio World / Susan M. Squier 1
Radio Technology across the Twentieth Century AT&T Invents Public Access Broadcasting in 1923: A Foreclosed Model for American Radio / Steven Wurtzler 39
Compromising Technologies: Government, the Radio Hobby, and the Discourse of Catastrophe in the Twentieth Century / Bruce Campbell 63
A Promise Diminished: The Politics of Low-Power Radio / Nina Huntemann 76
Radio Cultures Caribbean Voices on the Air: Radio, Poetry, and Nationalism in the Anglophone Caribbean / Laurence A. Breiner 93
The Forgotten Fifteen Million: Black Radio, Radicalism, and the Construction of the "Negro Market" / Kathy M. Newman 109
Packaged Alternatives: The Incorporation and Gendering of "Alternative" Radio / Lauren M. E. Goodlad 134
Science Literacies: The Mandate and Complicity of Popular Science on the Radio / Donald Ulin 164
Not Hearing Poetry on Public Radio / Martin Spinelli 195
Radio Ideologies In the Radio Way: Elizabeth II, the Female Voice-Over, and the Radio's Imperial Effects / Adrienne Munich 217
"If the Country's Going Gracie, So Can You": Gender Representation in Gracie Allen's Radio Comedy / Leah Lowe 237
"Are You Lonesome Tonight?”: Gendered Address in
The Lonesome Gal and
The Continental / Mary Desjardins and Mark Williams 251
Wireless Possibilities, Posthuman Possibilities: Brain Radio, Community Radio, Radio Lazarus / Susan M. Squier 275
Contributors 305
Index 307
