Ten years and 16 days ago we opened the doors on this website. On June 11, 2009 Matthew Lasar inaugurated Radio Survivor with this post: “Congress grills FCC, NAB on Low Power FM.” This was still about 18 months before the Local Community Radio Act was signed into law, opening up the most recent wave […]
Walter Benjamin’s first radio essay focused on the Berlin “Schnauze” or snout, but selectively so.
Radio Preservation Task Force’s Director Josh Shepperd and Conference Director Neil Verma are our guests for a discussion about the work of the Library of Congress initiative. They explain the significance of 2020 for radio history, share some of the accomplishments of the Task Force, and preview the next Radio Preservation Conference Task Force Conference, […]
It was 1934, and J. Edgar Hoover was sick of radio mysteries and comic strips that referred to “secret” government agents. We need a better name, he told his minions.
The Hip-Hop Radio Archive aims to digitize, preserve, share, and contextualize recordings of hip-hop radio from the 1980s and 1990s from commercial, college, community, and pirate stations of all sizes, telling the stories of the shows and the people that made them. Our guest is founder of the archive, Ryan MacMichael. This is a rebroadcast […]
This week our guest is Brian DeShazor, an independent radio researcher and founder of the Queer Radio Research Project. Formerly the Director of the Pacifica Radio Archives, DeShazor has taken a special interest in uncovering and highlighting the LGBTQ voices that have graced the community radio airwaves. On the episode, we discuss the history of […]
As some of you know, I study and teach two subjects in depth: the history of broadcasting and the history of the USA National Security State. These two topics merge when the objects of government wiretaps realize that they are being listened to, then make strategic comments or even entertain their eavesdroppers. At this point […]
On this week’s episode, scholar Lerone Martin shares with us the fascinating history of African-American preachers who distributed their sermons on 78rpm records during a time when they had limited access to the radio in the 1920s-1940s. Martin, Associate Professor in Religion and Politics at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at […]
We celebrated International Women’s Day by recording a fascinating interview about women’s radio history with University of Louisville Professor of History Christine Ehrick. Author of Radio and the Gendered Soundscape: Women and Broadcasting in Argentina and Uruguay, 1930-1950, Ehrick schools us on the hidden history of a pioneering women’s radio station in Uruguay. Founded in […]
Once upon a time radio, not Twitter, was the place where you blew up your world. An old Rat Pack story serves to illustrate . . .
