Product Description: The astonishing story of America’s airwaves, the two friends—one a media mogul, the other a famous inventor—who made them available to us, and the government which figured out how to put a price on air.This is the origin story of the airwaves—the foundational technology of the communications age—as told through the forty-year friendship of an entrepreneurial industrialist and a brilliant inventor...read more

Product Description: Immaterial Culture engages with texts that are now largely unread and dismissed as trivial or dubious: the vast body of plays - thrillers, narrative poetry, comedy sketches, documentaries and adaptations of literature and drama - that aired on American network radio during the medium’s so-called golden age...read more

Product Description: Seventy-five years after the infamous broadcast, does War of the Worlds still matter? This book answers with a resounding yes! Contributors revisit the broadcast event in order to reconsider its place as a milestone in media history, and to explore its role as a formative event for understanding citizens’ media use in times of crisis...read more

Product Description: It was Halloween 1938 when twenty-three year-old Orson Welles fooled America into thinking it had been invaded by aliens. The Mercury Theatre on the Air production of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds is one of the most talked-about radio broadcasts in history...read more

Product Description: During the Jazz Age and Great Depression, radio broadcasters did not conjure their listening public with a throw of a switch; the public had a hand in its own making. The Listener's Voice describes how a diverse array of Americans—boxing fans, radio amateurs, down-and-out laborers, small-town housewives, black government clerks, and Mexican farmers—participated in the formation of American radio, its genres, and its operations...read more

Product Description: The golden age of radio is often recalled as a time when the medium unified the nation, when families gathered around the radios in homes across the country to listen to live, commercially sponsored network broadcasts. In Points on the Dial, Alexander Russo revises our understanding of radio’s past by revealing the hidden histories of production, distribution, and reception practices during this era, which extended from the 1920s into the 1950s...read more