| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio. Ed. by Michele Hilmes and Jason Loviglio. (New York: Routledge, 2002. xvi, 569 pp. Cloth, $95.00, ISBN 0-415-92820-6. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 0-415-92821-4.)

Over the past dozen years, the social history of American radio has pushed its industrial history aside. The old tales of great men and their innovations (for example, works by Christopher H. Sterling and John M. Ross and by Michael Emery and Edwin Emery, still influential in journalism and media textbooks) offered a trajectory of progress that either leapt from the formation of NBC's Blue and Red networks and the passage of the Radio Act in the 1920s to the crisis of programming perpetrated by television after World War II or detoured only slightly through the genres of the so-called golden age of the 1930s and 1940s and the advent of FM. By contrast, books by Susan J. Douglas (1987, 1999), Michele Hilmes (1997), John Fiske (1994), and others interpret a cultural force whose content and politics reflect—and shape—cultural values. In this vein, the essays collected in Radio Reader, edited by Hilmes and Jason Loviglio, constitute an alternative American radio history from the 1920s to 1990s. Twenty-four chapters on little-known programs and practices, both local and national, detail the diversity along the dial and add to our understanding of how American commercial and public radio produced (and reproduce still) certain gendered, racist, and capital-biased structures.

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