Controversial American-led radio initiatives sparked a kaleidoscope of conflicts and rivalries from the medium’s earliest days through the end of World War II. Michael A. Krysko explores how the medium engaged the knowledge, assumptions, and prejudices that fueled listeners’ and policymakers’ objections to foreign and unwelcome radio content.
Krysko considers Americans’ antagonism toward non-English language broadcasting; issues of identity, geography, and sovereignty that propelled opposition to Mexico’s “border blaster” stations; how a project aimed at helping Cajun-speaking listeners became a French-only celebration of Acadian culture; a failed initiative to teach English to Latin Americans via shortwave broadcasting; enduring US-Panamanian conflicts over the control of radio in and around the Panama Canal; and how farmers from across the Southwest protested a radio treaty’s perceived preferential treatment of Cuba. Paying particular attention to the act of listening, Krysko shows how these initiatives illuminated and solidified divisions rooted in identity, nationalism, and prejudice.
Clear and wide-ranging, Contested Airwaves reveals early radio’s place at the nexus of public programming, transnational relations, and its own evolution as a communication medium.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Microphone Is Mightier than the Machine Gun-Visions of
Cooperation and Realities of Conflict in Early American Radio
Part I. Imagining the Foreign Menace
Chapter
1. Broadcasting in the Language of the Enemies of
Civilization-Foreign Language Broadcasting and American Radio, 19201940
Chapter
2. An Invasion by Radio Is Crossing the Mexican Border-John
Brinkley, Border Blasters, and the Geography of American National Identity in
the 1930s
Part II. Language Education and Identity on the Radio
Chapter
3. To Help the French Speaking People of Louisiana-Language,
Education, and Identity in the French Radio Project at Louisiana State
University, 19381940
Chapter
4. An Efficient Way to Spread Shakespeares Beautiful
Language-Basic English, Language Education, and American International
Radio, 19351941
Part III. Colonized Airwaves
Chapter
5. A Workable Scheme to Quiet the Panaman Clamor-US Radio Policy
in Panama in the Shadow of the World Wars
Chapter
6. An Almost Unbelievable Disregard of the Interests of the United
States Listeners and Broadcasters-US-Cuban Relations, American Identities,
and the 1946 North American Regional Broadcasting Agreement
Conclusion: From Whistling and Singing La Paloma to No Way, JosÉ-A
Century of Continuity and Change in Communications, Identity, and Borders
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Michael A. Krysko is an associate professor of history at Kansas State University. He is the author of American Radio in China: International Encounters with Technology and Communications, 1919-41.
