ONLY CONNECT is a comprehensive history of American broadcasting from its earliest days in radio, through the rise of television, to the current era of digital media and the Internet. It presents broadcasting as a vital component of American cultural identity, placing the development of U.S. radio, television, and new media in the context of social and cultural change. Each chapter opens with a discussion of the historical period, thoroughly traces the development of media policy, the growth of media industries, and the history of U.S. broadcast programming, and closes with a look at the major ways that radio and television have been understood and discussed throughout American history.
I am an historian of broadcasting and Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For more than 20 years I've taught classes in the history of broadcasting and in various aspects of broadcast texts, industry, and representation. I find the period of radio before TV particularly fascinating, though I also write and teach on television and on sound more generally. For more info, you can go to http://commarts.wisc.edu/directory/?person=mhilmes.
Most recently I completed -- after ten years of research in British and American archives -- a study that looks at the long history of trans-Atlantic cross influence, and its implications worldwide: Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting (Routledge 2011). It tells the story of the intertwining development of radio and television culture in those two nations, from the earliest amateurs through World War II and into the era of co-production with PBS and other US networks.
I'm currently at work, with my co-editor Jason Loviglio, on an edited volume that follows up on our 2002 volume The Radio Reader. It's titled Radio's New Wave: Global Audio in the Digital Era (Routledge 2013), and it will feature a stellar line-up of scholars writing on the way that digital technology has changed both radio and the way we study it.
My other ongoing project is the textbook Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States (3rd edition, Wadsworth 2009). This is meant for undergraduates and beginning graduate students in media studies, and covers the development of broadcasting industry, policy, programming, and reception from the teens through the present. I'm at work on a 4th edition that should come out in 2013.
Other publications include NBC: America's Network, a collection of original articles by leading scholars on the history of the NBC network; Hollywood and Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable, an early work that looked at the economic and textual intersections between the film and broadcasting industries from the 1920s to the 1980s; Radio Voices: American Broadcasting 1922 to 1952, which went back to the period of network radio to show how its structures and program forms evolved in the context of national identity and its negotiations of gender, race and ethnicity; and the Television History Book (with Jason Jacobs).
