This week, we explore the ancestor of public radio in the United States: educational radio. Our guest, Stephanie Sapienza, helps to bring educational radio archives to life through her work on the multi-institution “Unlocking the Airwaves” project. As Digital Humanities Archivist at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at University of Maryland, Sapienza […]
One of the biggest celebrities in Los Angeles in the early part of the 20th century was Aimee Semple McPherson. She inspired scandalous headlines and fictional depictions, including the character Sister Molly on the current Showtime series, Penny Dreadful: City of Angels. Yet the story that is less frequently told is McPherson’s embrace of radio. […]
“Every child recognizes that it is in the interest of radio to bring anyone before the microphone at any opportunity,” Walter Benjamin wrote in 1930 or 1931. Yet when he visited the microphone he mostly brought only himself. Why?
This Tuesday, April 21, at 12 PM EDT I’ll be participating in an online panel on the “History of Internet Radio,” as part of the first World Audio Day virtual conference. I’m really excited to be in the company of excellent co-panelists: Dom Robinson is UK-based writer and technologist who has written about the 25th […]
WBCN in Boston, MA is one of the storied freeform FM stations in American commercial radio history. We’re talking about it because there’s a recent documentary film, entitled “WBCN and the American Revolution,” that dives into its history, and how WBCN’s early days in the late 60s and early 70s are intertwined with the counter […]
Can you describe a German brassworks factory on the radio? #walterbenjamin said it wasn’t possible, then proved that it was.
As we enter our second decade of everything-digital-on-demand, the desire for tactile media only seems to grow new buds. By now the vinyl resurgence is old news, and while mainstream publications still gasp or tsk-tsk at the cassette revival, I think we can safely say the tape medium has retaken a beachhead, too. Today is […]
Scholar Jocelyn Robinson says about one-third of Historically Black Colleges and Universities have radio stations. Her mission is to survey them and help preserve their histories and recorded legacies through the HBCU Radio Station Archival Survey Project, which she directs. On this episode Robinson tells us about this project, and explains why it’s important to […]
Welcome to 2020! As Matthew Lasar noted this week, this year marks the 100th anniversary of some significant moments in radio history, including KDKA’s first broadcast. While other stations were on the air with regular broadcasts prior to 1920 (shout out to Doc Herrold’s early broadcasts to fellow radio amateurs); KDKA’s debut is a rallying […]
Get ready for a decade of “100 years ago today” stories about the first this that and the other thing, radio-wise.
