Did They Say What They Thought? Gender,Sound, and Oral History in a Wisconsin Women’s Radio Program

The physical remnants of long-lost radio programs are not the only sounds that broadcast historians must unearth to unravel the mysteries of radio production and reception. In this essay, I examine the audio tapes of a 1980 oral history interview of Isabel Baumann, a Wisconsin farm wife, rural activist, and radio personality who appeared for twenty years on a monthly local radio show called The We Say What We Think Club. I tell the story of how these recordings came to be archived at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin and the unique institutional context that preserved Baumann’s voice for future generations. The tapes of Baumann’s recollections of her farm life and radio career offer us not only one of the few examples of the sound of Baumann’s voice, but gives insight into how the very process of making oral histories helped her (and ultimately, us) understand the power of her radio work. Oral histories offer a space for women, so often marginalized in the industry and in historical narratives, to say what they think. Most importantly, the audio recovered from these academic projects allow historians to record with more fidelity what these women thought.     

Broadcasting Queer Feminisms: Lesbian and Queer Women Programming in Transnational,Local, and Community Radio

Notable radio scholars including Christine Ehrick, Phylis A. Johnson, and Caroline Mitchell have explored critical challenges of gender and sexuality radio research and its importance in relation to communities. A major issue faced in studying the early years of women’s history in broadcast is the ephemeral nature of the medium as many of the voices are lost in the ether, unrecorded or once deemed inessential to archive. Web-based radio and podcast archives provide renewed avenues for listening to lesbian and queer women’s radio across transnational borders yet many long running shows in Canada such as The Lesbian Show on Vancouver Co-Op Radio have only recently begun to surface as digital collections. As personal and institutional archives of lesbian and queer women radio begin to reach a public audience, analysis of radio works across decades of LGBTQ2+ activism and feminisms must be traced to understand the role of radio and digital radiogenic media in creating space and identity for queer activism. A turn to the past brings forward questions of analog and digital futures for radio and podcasting space as place to construct and shape queer and especially lesbian communities and identities in the North American broadcasting industry. Through research of notable live and pre-produced content including Dykes on Mykes on CKUT 90.3 FM, and The Lesbian Show on Vancouver Co-Op Radio, this work offers an exploration of radio and radiogenic media’s role in creating sonic space for queer and feminist subjectivities.     

Black Radio Listeners in America’s “Golden Age”

“Black Radio Listeners in America’s “Golden Age’” argues that U.S. black listenership has been all but ignored in radio scholarship regarding the 1930s-1950s, as has the context of America’s racial segregation and radio’s active role in affirming and propagating it. The essay argues for an expanded understanding of archive and archival methodology in order to gain a more complex, accurate, and varied understanding of historical black listenership, and, toward that end, performs culturally contextualized close textual analysis across media: a 1937 Lead Belly song (“Turn Yo’ Radio On”), Joe Bostic’s column for The People’s Voice in the 1940s, Frederic Wakeman’s 1946 novel The Hucksters, a 1949 feature on black listeners in Sponsor magazine, a 1934 Vitaphone Short featuring Cab Calloway, and Ann Petry’s 1946 novel The Street. Through engaging with widely-varied representations of black radio listenership, Stoever argues that black listening practices from this period not only challenge the periodization of this era as the “Golden Age” of American radio, but also upend traditional categories of active, passive, and “resistant” listening that scholars have employed to understand media reception, revealing that active listening can look and sound different for black listeners, particularly in a period when listening “actively” to segregated media in ways prescribed by the dominant culture often proved to be deleterious. The act of “turning one’s radio on” was a complicated act of agency for black listeners, not simply a passive form of ignorance, escape, and/or anesthetization as popularly represented.     

Métissage on the Airwaves: Toward a Cultural History of Broadcasting in French Colonial Algeria, 1930–1936

This article explores the methodological challenges and possibilities of writing a cultural history of broadcasting in French colonial Algeria during the tumultuous decades between the two world wars. In a diverse, multi-ethnic colonial society, how can historians and media scholars evaluate audience reception? What meanings did radio broadcasting acquire in the colonial context? To answer these questions, this article considers the controversies surrounding two culturally hybrid broadcasts produced by Radio-Algiers during the 1930s. A careful examination of the remaining historical record concerning these broadcasts, from newspaper accounts to archival sources, exposes the cultural fluidity that typified everyday colonial life and reveals how radio broadcasting politicized music and oral language in novel ways. Broadcasting—as a purely sonic medium—challenged the classificatory mechanisms of the French colonial state and the racial and ethnic boundaries that undergirded colonial society. In consequence, historical memories of Radio-Algiers and its role during the waning years of the French empire deny the sonic cultural hybridity that flourished over the interwar airwaves.     

Censorship and Scarcity

This article presents a case study on how goods scarcity, both natural and artificially created, was used along with censorship to control the Portuguese public's access to information during the 1930s and 1940s. Even though the dictatorship that ruled Portugal from 1933 relied on a censorship apparatus that prevented the publication and broadcast of many pieces of national and international news, the research presented in this article demonstrates how the regime took advantage of the Spanish Civil War and World War II to increase restrictions on the circulation of information, justifying this through the artificially created scarcity of paper and radio frequencies. Furthermore, this article also describes how a third type of scarcity—that of electricity—also restricted listeners' access to radio broadcasts, which led many Portuguese to make sacrifices in order to listen to updated news.     

Typologies of radio station target audiences

One of the most frustrating methodological problems facing researchers interested in broadcast programming is that of classification of target audiences and programming formats. The following article presents a new approach to this problem, one that keeps in mind the varying approaches to radio programming in the United States today. Robert Moomey is Program Manager of WIND, the Westinghouse Broadcasting Company radio station in Chicago. Roger Skolnik, who formerly was on the faculty of the University of Illniois at Chicago Circle, recently earned his doctorate in Michigan State Unversity and currently is Executive Producer at WIND.     

Archives,Advocacy and Crowd-Sourcing: Towards a More Complete Historiography of College Radio

Student-run radio stations at colleges and universities have thrived for nearly a century, yet their stories have been largely excluded from broadcast histories outside the commonly cited and overly simplified “college radio” era in the 1980s. Offering a more accurate definition of college radio, this article demonstrates the need for broader methodologies to contextualize its history, and advocates for the preservation of unique materials containing the voices of generations of young broadcasters. Audiovisual archivists, scholars, and members of the college radio community must engage in collaborative, interdisciplinary efforts in order to save these materials and make them accessible for research.     

Aural Atavism: The Witch's Tale and Gothic Horror Radio

This article offers a cultural historical interpretation of The Witch's Tale (1931–38), an early U.S. horror radio drama, and argues that the program's use of the Gothic genre unified its content and form. Its plays emphasized temporality to highlight the Gothic intertwining of the past and present, and offered allegories that while often rooted in the fantastic nevertheless addressed contemporary concerns—gender, Others, and socio-economic anxieties. It used sound to complement its content, evoking the supernatural and monsters, and cuing and sustaining suspense. And it tapped radio's connotation as a supernatural medium to complement and magnify its generic horror.     

Fred Allen and Radio Comedy as a Vehicle of Social Criticism

Fred Allen, a leading network radio comedian from 1932 to 1949, was one of the few broadcast comics to specialize in social commentary. In a medium which strove to avoid the controversial, Allen performed three important functions of the social critic. He denied the truth of cherished American beliefs and toppled sacred national idols. He challenged the authority of dominant social groups, particularly business leaders, most particularly network radio executives. Finally, he defended the freedom of the individual artist especially writers and performers, in the mass media. Allen's legacy is a reminder that radio during the 1930s and 1940s offered more than diverting amusement.     

芝加哥学派的阅读研究

芝加哥学派的阅读研究主要是指在20世纪30年代,美国芝加哥大学图书馆学研究生院道格拉斯·韦普尔斯等人所进行的阅读研究.此外,巴特勒和谢拉在致力于构建他们的图书馆学科学体系的时候,都没有忽视阅读的作用,他们认为,正是通过阅读,个人才能学习社会知识,图书馆作为人和书写记录之间媒介的功能才得以实现.芝加哥学派阅读研究所取得的成果不仅使美国阅读调研传统得以形成,而且对中国目前的阅读研究也有重要的参考价值.     

Programs for Posterity

This essay explores the diverse field of audio records manufactured as tie-ins to popular American radio programs of the postwar period. Little has been written on such products as meaningful artifacts of consumption during any phase in broadcasting history. Yet radio records proved especially meaningful to customers in the 1940s and 1950s, as they offered a highly convenient way to upend rigid transmission schedules and program ephemerality. Here, I focus on spoken word radio albums that promised listeners important broadcast knowledge stored for ‘posterity’ on disk. Phonograph companies like Columbia banked on consumer interest in replay of these programs to sell radio records as technologies of permanence and documents with unparalleled historical and cultural value. I analyze program-to-record case studies like You Are There (1949) and The Quick and the Dead (1951) to illustrate how producers lay claim to historical authenticity via capturing, recording, or releasing transient moments on records.     

Historical Constitution of Public Radio Stations in Brazil

Educational, state, cultural, and university radio stations have already developed over more than 70 years of history in Brazilian radio broadcasting. Currently, there are hundreds of stations transmitting across the country, from the North to the South. Some of them—that in the 1990s included 100 broadcasting stations and among these, the oldest and nationally referenced—up to this decade operated and were referenced as a component of the educational radio system. Mainly from this period on, most of these stations began to call themselves public. And, especially due to their programming, they have been attempting to define themselves within the profile of public radio stations. The purpose of this article is to uncover the historical construction of this group of radio broadcasting stations, by means of a timeframe, from the advent of the non-commercial segment in the 1930s until today. It reconstructs referential models and presents main threads and features of the programming of these stations throughout these seven decades. In this way, it will also evince how Brazil is constructing its model of public radio.     

Visualizing Critique: Montage as a practice of alternative media

Postwar religious broadcasting in Britain sought to accommodate diverging aims, with public radio as the established arena for Christian evangelism and yet also an emerging forum for dissenting viewpoints in an increasingly faith-averse age. A transitional figure within literary modernism, E. M. Forster embraced broadcast radio in the effort to disseminate ‘culture,’ even as he sought to make the ethical turn away from culture as religious. Since the 1930s, Forster had consistently supported the airing of such ‘minority’ viewpoints; after the war, his arguments for ethical alternatives to Christian broadcasting were bolstered by the rise of postwar ecumenism and the Beveridge reforms. Forster's defense of humanist broadcasts given by Margaret Knight in January 1955 effectively highlights the formated nature of on-air debates at the expense of unpopular viewpoints, even as BBC policy-makers were actively considering abandoning existing practices in favor of stand-alone ethical rebuttals to accepted Christian viewpoints.     

Some effects of voice quality on retention

All radio and television stations in some way use the human voice as a major communications tool in their programming and their programs and advertising messages. Although some research into this instrument was conducted, particularly in the late 1920s and 1930s, research into the qualities and effects of broadcast voices recently has been infrequent.

Ken Hadwiger earned the M.A. from the University of Iowa and the Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma. A former member of the faculty at Wichita State University, he presently is Director of Mass Communications at Eastern Illinois University. Dr. Hadwiger has logged eight years of professional radio and television announcing and directing experience.     

Consolidation and separation: British archives and American historians at the turn of the twentieth century

Although American historians used British archives throughout the nineteenth century, the most fruitful period of contact was in the decades covering the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Scholarly collaboration and initiatives for ‘advanced historical training’ were accompanied by American funding which provided for both intellectual and physical access to British archives. From the 1920s, the formalisation of many of these relationships and projects contributed towards the development of the separate professional structures which exist today for archivists and historians on both sides of the Atlantic. This process has obscured the role of the many individuals whose activities spanned, without arousing comment, both groups pre-1930. One such British ‘historical worker’ was Hubert Hall. While Hall’s long career provides many examples of trans-Atlantic collaboration, it also coincided almost exactly with the establishment of firm professional boundaries, a development which inevitably led to the demise of the generalist ‘historical worker’ as a recognisable type.     

Citation Classics in Urban Sociology: Mapping the Intellectual Evolution of a Research Specialty

Abstract

This study identifies, describes, and analyzes the most highly cited works in the urban sociology literature to investigate empirically the subfield’s intellectual foundations, its future research directions, and its relationship to the broader discipline of sociology. The findings show that these landmark publications are more likely to be authored by United States based scholars, study cities in the United States, propose new concepts, and address the topic of racial inequality. They include works of classical sociology, traditional urban sociology, and new urban sociology. This study concludes that the Chicago School’s legacy continues to shape contemporary urban sociology as the specialty expands in interdisciplinary directions.     

A prescription for AM radio programming!

During the past several years the academic community has written an obituary for radio, particularly AM radio. The broadcast curricula usually lack “real world”; orientation. Programming, sales, and management classes often reflect materials designed more appropriately for large metro radio stations. Little research has been published on AM or FM radio. The lack of academic journals devoted exclusively to radio broadcasting (exception is the new Journal of Radio Studies) testifies to the importance the academic community places on radio broadcast research and theoretical concepts. The author suggests a rapprochement of broadcasting curricula, including programming—a critical element in any future success of radio, and AM in particular.     

Sight versus Sound: The Differential Impact of Mediated Spectator Response in Sport Broadcasts

Despite the research examining various production aspects of broadcast sport, scholars have generally overlooked a ubiquitous sonic component of broadcasts—spectators’ aural response (i.e., crowd noise). Such cues can act as a heuristic to influence perceptions of competition, particularly in the absence of visuals. Using continuous response measurement, this experiment demonstrates how mediated spectator response in the form of crowd noise yields enhanced perceptions of the exciting nature of broadcast sport, although the effect is diminished in televised sports. Implications are suggested for contemporary sport consumption, where aural cues can draw attention to game events in multi-screen viewing scenarios.     

Hier 1st 1212: Operation Annie,World War II Allied Psychological Warfare,and the Capture of the Rhineland

This study concerns an American-operated clandestine short-wave radio station that broadcast as both a strategic and tactical station during the Battle of the Bulge in Germany. Operation Annie's strategic mission was to generate distrust for the Nazi leadership among troops and increase their reliance on news reports emanating from the station. Her tactical mission was to then use her reputation for truthfulness to lure listeners into a military ambush known today as the Saar Pocket, thus facilitating the capture of the Rhineland. This research reviews the development of Operation Annie and its missions and evaluates the station's success as a model of effective wartime propaganda.