Communities of the Air

Susan Merrill Squier is Brill Professor of Women’s Studies and English at Pennsylvania State University. She is author of Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology and coeditor of Playing Dolly: Technocultural Formations, Fantasies, and Fictions of Assisted Reproduction and Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation.

• Acknowledgments ixCommunities of the Air: Introducing the Radio World / Susan M. Squier 1Radio Technology across the Twentieth Century AT&T Invents Public Access Broadcasting in 1923: A Foreclosed Model for American Radio / Steven Wurtzler 39Compromising Technologies: Government, the Radio Hobby, and the Discourse of Catastrophe in the Twentieth Century / Bruce Campbell 63A Promise Diminished: The Politics of Low-Power Radio / Nina Huntemann 76Radio Cultures Caribbean Voices on the Air: Radio, Poetry, and Nationalism in the Anglophone Caribbean / Laurence A. Breiner 93The Forgotten Fifteen Million: Black Radio, Radicalism, and the Construction of the "Negro Market" / Kathy M. Newman 109Packaged Alternatives: The Incorporation and Gendering of "Alternative" Radio / Lauren M. E. Goodlad 134Science Literacies: The Mandate and Complicity of Popular Science on the Radio / Donald Ulin 164Not Hearing Poetry on Public Radio / Martin Spinelli 195Radio Ideologies In the Radio Way: Elizabeth II, the Female Voice-Over, and the Radio's Imperial Effects / Adrienne Munich 217"If the Country's Going Gracie, So Can You": Gender Representation in Gracie Allen's Radio Comedy / Leah Lowe 237"Are You Lonesome Tonight?": Gendered Address in The Lonesome Gal and The Continental / Mary Desjardins and Mark Williams 251Wireless Possibilities, Posthuman Possibilities: Brain Radio, Community Radio, Radio Lazarus / Susan M. Squier 275Contributors 305Index 307

“Communities of the Air covers historical periods, genres, performers, program types, and audiences not previously discussed in this still all too thin area of radio studies.“-Susan Jeanne Douglas, author of Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination “Turn up the volume! At last, we’re tuned in to the right frequency for radio studies. We all listen to radio, we remember our lives through it-and now we have the tools to understand it too.“-Toby Miller, author of Technologies of Truth: Cultural Citizenship and Popular Media