ABSTRACT

Using radio-themed newsreel footage from the University of South Carolina’s Fox Movietone News Collection, this chapter attends to practices of “watching radio” as both a matter of historical praxis and as a self-conscious historiographical strategy. At one level, the prominence of radio-themed newsreel footage blurs boundaries between what are traditionally considered discrete media, suggesting practices of early twentieth-century moviegoing as simultaneously acts of radio consumption. At another level, VanCour argues that historians, too, need to engage in practices of watching radio, making use of often neglected screen resources that can fill otherwise intractable gaps in the historical record in order to offer an important window on a period in radio’s development for which few recordings survive. Consulting detailed record descriptions in the Movietone News Collection, supplemented by viewings of selected films, VanCour argues that radio-themed newsfilms offer an underutilized resource that can aid current research agendas in broadcast era historiography and help overcome the limitations of sources in standard radio collections.