| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture. Ed. by Susan Merrill Squier. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. xii, 318 pp. Cloth, $64.95, ISBN 0-8223-3083-0. Paper, $21.95, ISBN 0-8223-3095-4.)

The international field sometimes referred to as radio studies continues to flourish with conferences, new journals, articles, and monographs, and now, a new anthology. J. Fred MacDonald, Susan Douglas, Susan Smulyan, and Michele Hilmes are among the Americanists who have firmly allied the study of radio with social and cultural history and theory. While this is not a work by historians per se, fully two-thirds of the contributors to this volume are engaging historical questions and texts. Historians thus represent one among many "communities of the air," in the editor Susan Merrill Squier's phrase, who "study and theorize radio as a technological, social, and cultural phenomenon" (p. 1). Critical cultural studies and techniques of ideological criticism predominate in the anthology, which is not surprising given that the project emerged from a group of panels sponsored by the Modern Language Association's Division of Literature and Science in 1998. Close readings of radio programs (drama, music, popular science), discursive and aesthetic criticism, and analysis of contemporary policy, technological, and program trends dominate the collection.

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