Synopses & Reviews
Orson Welless greatest breakthrough into the popular consciousness occurred in 1938, three years before Citizen Kane, when his War of the Worlds radio broadcast succeeded so spectacularly that terrified listeners believed they were hearing a genuine report of an alien invasion—a landmark in the history of radios powerful relationship with its audience. In Radios America, Bruce Lenthall documents the enormous impact radio had on the lives of Depression-era Americans and charts the formative years of our modern mass culture.
Many Americans became alienated from their government and economy in the twentieth century, and Lenthall explains that radios appeal came from its capability to personalize an increasingly impersonal public arena. His depictions of such figures as proto-Fascist Charles Coughlin and medical quack John Brinkley offer penetrating insight into radios use as a persuasive tool, and Lenthalls book is unique in its exploration of how ordinary Americans made radio a part of their lives. Television inherited radios cultural role, and as the voting tallies for American Idol attest, broadcasting continues to occupy a powerfully intimate place in American life. Radios America reveals how the connections between power and mass media began.
Review
“This impressive and engaging book explores how broadcast radio was used and conceptualized by ordinary listeners, politicians, priests, doctors, dramatists, and intellectuals. Bruce Lenthall demonstrates great breadth of knowledge of the period as he synthesizes in a very readable fashion an enormous amount of material usually considered separately. This collage of unlikely elements fleshes out the rich and contradictory ways various sectors of the culture negotiated modern mass society by using radio to speak about their worlds.”
Review
"Required reading for those who still believe that American radio, from its inception, encompassed only defenseless audiences and hegemonic broadcasters."
Review
“In
Radios America, Bruce Lenthall provides a perceptive and balanced overview of radios major contributions to American culture during its most vital years, years that were truly formative not only of American broadcasting but of our history as a nation as well. Lenthall encourages us to reevaluate what we think we know about the beginnings of mediated mass culture in the United States. His analysis, clearly written to appeal to a broad audience, refreshes old debates and sheds new light on unexplored figures and ideas.”
Review
"Lenthall ably demonstrates how radio embodied contradictory elements of 1930s life and served as a screen on which larger social and cultural dynamics were projected. Combined with a highly readable prose style, this would serve a useful viewpoint in courses in U.S. social and cultural history. . . . A solid and highly readable discussion of the relationship of radio to mass culture."
About the Author
Bruce Lenthall is director of the Center for Teaching and Learning and adjunct assistant professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: “The Story of the Century” 1
1 Radios Challenges
Public Intellectuals and the Problem of Mass Culture
William Orton and the Mass-Consumption Critique
James Rorty and the Mass-Production Critique
African American Intellectuals and the Mass-Production Critique in Action
Related Solutions
Defenders of the Faith
2 Radios Listeners
Personalizing Mass Culture
The Mass Audience Listens
Consumer Bargaining
“When You Cant Find a Friend, Youve Still Got the Radio”
3 Radios Democracy
The Politics of the Fireside
Roosevelt on the Radio
Radio Democracy: The Politics of Intimacy
Radio Democracy: The Politics of Information
Once and Future Ideals?
4 Radios Champions
Strange Gods?
Radio Stars
Voices of the People
Power . . . Corrupts?
Limited Amplitude
5 Radios Students
Media Studies and the Possibilities of Mass Communication
Paul Lazarsfeld and Social Pragmatisms Hope
Herman Hettinger and Commercial Pragmatisms Faith
Theodor Adornos Critical Theory: A Considerably Less Charitable View
6 Radios Writers
A Public Voice in the Modern World
Art of the Air
Public Speech, Public Art, and Mass Communication
Modernism on the Air
Muffled Voices
Conclusion Notes
Index