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St. Louis sits near the center of the United States in an area sometimes termed "flyover" territory by those who live on the coasts. Although this city in the middle of the country is not generally known as the birthplace of broadcasting, it is in fact where Nikola Tesla demonstrated the first true "broadcast" in March 1893. Later, in 1920, two St. Louis men began a radio broadcast announcing the results of the Harding-Cox presidential election on the same night as KDKA in Pittsburgh, but the Pennsylvania event received all of the national recognition. Wireless broadcasts (in Morse code) of weather information were emanating from the campus of St. Louis University in 1912; that station, 9YK, became WEW in 1922. Television was introduced to St. Louisans in 1947, although at least one forward-thinking local broadcaster was experimenting with the medium as early as 1928.
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The golden age of radio is often recalled as a time when the medium unified the nation, when families gathered around the radios in homes across the country to listen to live, commercially sponsored network broadcasts. In Points on the Dial, Alexander Russo revises our understanding of radio’s past by revealing the hidden histories of production, distribution, and reception practices during this era, which extended from the 1920s into the 1950s. Russo brings to light a tiered broadcasting system with intermingling but distinct national, regional, and local programming forms, sponsorship patterns, and methods of program distribution. Examining a wide range of practices, including regional networking, sound-on-disc transcription, the use of station representatives, spot advertising, and programming aimed at homes with several radios, he not only recasts our understanding of the relationship between national networks and local stations but also charts the development of new ways of listening—often distractedly rather than attentively—that set the stage for radio in the second half of the twentieth century.
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