Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio - Softcover

"The contributors to this volume persuasively argue that the radio has been at the center of the American imaginative and political life in the twentieth century.an important and entertaining book by two leading scholars." -Lary May, author of "The Big Tomorrow, Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way "From music to mysteries, call-ins to comedy, advertising to advocacy, and religion to racial uplift, it's all here in ""Radio Reader." -George Lipsitz, author of "Time Passages "Radio had been ubiquitous in American life since the late 1920s. With this seminal book, we may now begin to understand what this has meant to our civilization. Bravo!." -J. Fred MacDonald, Professor Emeritus, Northeastern Illinois University "Long marginalized in American media historiography, radio finally receives fitting scholarly treatment. "Radio Reader should be required reading for any serious student of media history." -Robert C. Allen, Professor of History, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill ""Radio Reader re-invents the radio as an object of study by letting us hear disembodied and contradictory voices from the past. An indispensable collection!." -Janet Staiger, William P. Hobby Centennial Professor of Communication, University of Texas at Austin.

While cultural historians and media scholars have been looking at television for decades, they have only recently turned their eyes (and ears) to radio. Studies of television rarely acknowledge that many of its forms-soap operas, situation comedies, quiz shows, sportscasts, etc.-all evolved out of the earlier medium. The essays collected here demonstrate that radio set patterns that have effected all forms of media that have followed it, and also look at how it has survived the coming of media that supposedly made it obsolete.