Listening In: Radio and the American ImaginationFew inventions evoke such nostalgia, such deeply personal and vivid memories as radio—from Amos ’n’ Andy and Edward R. Murrow to Wolfman Jack and Howard Stern. Listening In is the first in-depth history of how radio culture and content have kneaded and expanded the American psyche. But Listening In is more than a history. It is also a reconsideration of what listening to radio has done to American culture in the twentieth century and how it has brought a completely new auditory dimension to our lives. Susan Douglas explores how listening has altered our day-to-day experiences and our own generational identities, cultivating different modes of listening in different eras; how radio has shaped our views of race, gender roles, ethnic barriers, family dynamics, leadership, and the generation gap. With her trademark wit, Douglas has created an eminently readable cultural history of radio. |
Contents
| 3 | |
| 22 | |
The Ethereal World | 40 |
Exploratory Listening in the 1920s | 55 |
Tuning In to Jazz | 83 |
Radio Comedy and Linguistic Slapstick | 100 |
The Invention of the Audience | 124 |
World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism | 161 |
The Kids Take Over Transistors DJs and Rock n Roll | 219 |
The FM Revolution | 256 |
Talk Talk | 284 |
Why Ham Radio Matters | 328 |
Is Listening Dead? | 347 |
Notes | 359 |
Index | 391 |
Playing Fields of the Mind | 199 |
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Common terms and phrases
advertisers African American airwaves Alan Freed Allen amateurs Amos n announcer audience baseball became Burns and Allen called Cantril and Allport Chicago cognitive commercial corporate culture disc jockey DXing early emotional especially ether fans FM stations format Fornatale frequencies H. V. Kaltenborn Harry Caray hear heard helped host Ibid imagined Imus industry Interview invention Jack jazz Kaltenborn late Lazarsfeld Limbaugh live male manhood masculinity medium million modes of listening Museum of Television networks night people's percent phonograph played political popular programming Radio Broadcast radio comedy radio listening radio stations record Red Barber reported rock Rush Limbaugh sense shortwave social songs sound stories talk radio talk show thing tion Tony Pigg tuned turn voice wanted WDIA Winchell wireless Wolfman Jack women York
Popular passages
Page 190 - You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames that burned it. You laid the dead of London at our doors and we knew the dead were our dead — were all men's dead — were mankind's dead — and ours.
Page 91 - ... the power of censorship over the radio communications or signals transmitted by any radio station, and no regulation or condition shall be promulgated or fixed by the commission which shall interfere with the right of free speech by means of radio communication.
Page 243 - Born theoretically white, we are permitted to pass our childhood as imaginary Indians, our adolescence as imaginary Negroes, and only then are expected to settle down to being what we really are: white once more.
Page 324 - all the women are strong, all the men are goodlooking, and all the children are above average.
Page 95 - Jazz isn't music merely, it is a spirit that can express itself in almost anything. The true spirit of jazz is a joyous revolt from convention, custom, authority, boredom, even sorrow — from everything that would confine the soul of man and hinder its riding free on the air. The Negroes who invented it called their songs the "Blues," and they weren't capable of satire or deception.
Page 188 - The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by air. President Roosevelt has just announced.
Page 96 - ... without the interposition of the intellect; but if the process of civilization continues (will it? I am not so sure, nor entirely convinced that it should) the greatest art is likely to be that in which an uncorrupted sensibility is worked by a creative intelligence. So far in their music the negroes have given their response to the world with an exceptional naivete, a directness of expression which has interested our minds as well as touched our emotions; they have shown comparatively little...
Page 293 - Americans' escalating mistrust of a range of national institutions. "Trust in government," he reported in the late 1970s, "declined dramatically from almost 80 percent in the late 1950s to about 33 percent in 1976. Confidence in business fell from approximately a 70 percent level in the late '60s to about 1 5 percent today.
Page 76 - Here are hundreds of little towns set down in type so small that it can hardly be read. How unrelated they seem ! Then picture the tens of thousands of farmhouses on the prairies, in the valleys, along the rivers — houses that cannot be noted.
Page 184 - Do you think the United States should do everything possible to help England and France win the war, except go to war ourselves...