Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio

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.