An Audio History Starter Pack

I got to interview Northwestern professor and audio scholar Neil Verma on stage at Podcast Movement in Chicago on April 3, 2025. We were talking about his latest book, Narrative Podcasting in an Age of Obsession, which is a fascinating backwards look at the recent past. Podcasters may think of our medium as new — but Verma, who studies radio history, knows better.

I promised the crowd at Podcast Movement a reading list, so here it is. Every single one of these books represents years of scholarship — grad students and other academics finding and listening to old radio broadcasts or newer audio productions, digging in the archives, and just thinking about the medium of audio. They find patterns that we in the business only dimly perceive. And on top of that, they often have to argue within their cinema- and print-biased media departments that audio is worth studying at all. Mad respect to the scholars!

This bibliography below is only a beginning — but if you’re looking for a place to start, I hope it helps. At the end, I include digital resources as well. 

Aitken, H. G. J. (1985). Syntony and spark: the origins of radio. Princeton University Press.

Douglas, S. J. (2004). Listening in: radio and the American imagination. University of Minnesota Press.

Halper, D. L. (2014). Invisible stars: a social history of women in American broadcasting. M.E. Sharpe.

Hilmes, M. (1997). Radio voices: American broadcasting, 1922-1952. University of Minnesota Press.

Hilmes, M., & Bottomley, A. (2024). The Oxford Handbook of Radio and Podcasting. Oxford University Press.

Lacey, K. (2013). Listening publics: the politics and experience of listening in the media age. Polity.

McHugh, S. (2022). The Power of Podcasting. Columbia University Press. 

Meyers, C. B. (2013). A word from our sponsor: admen, advertising, and the golden age of radio. Fordham University Press.

Porter, J. L. (2016). Lost sound: the forgotten art of radio storytelling. The University of North Carolina Press.

Russo, A. (2010). Points on the dial: golden age radio beyond the networks. Duke University Press.

Schwartz, A. B. (2015). Broadcast hysteria: Orson Welles’s War of the worlds and the art of fake news. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Sterne, J. (2003). The audible past: cultural origins of sound reproduction. Duke University Press.

Stoever, J. L. (2016). The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening. New York University Press.

Smulyan, S. (1994). Selling radio : the commercialization of American broadcasting, 1920-1934. Smithsonian Institution Press.

VanCour, S. (2018). Making radio: early radio production and the rise of modern sound culture. Oxford University Press.

Verma, N. (2024). Narrative podcasting in an age of obsession. University of Michigan Press.

If you prefer to listen to your audio scholarship, I cannot recommend the Pushkin show The Last Archive enough. In particular, the second season has some great episodes on radio history, including Believe It! (which starts off with radio “influencer” Robert Ripley, and moves on to racial impersonators and shysters) and The Inner Front, about efforts to combat Nazi radio propaganda. I got to serve as editor on this series, but it’s really the work of historian Jill Lepore, executive producer Sophie Crane, senior producer Ben Naddaff-Hafrey and producer Lucie Sullivan. I’m pretty sure Ben was the last person to check out most of the radio history books currently on my shelves in the Harvard library. He got me obsessed with how much I didn’t know, and after you listen to his show, you may be as well.

Finally — and fortunately — more and more of audio’s history is getting digitized. Here are a few links to projects that preserve tons of old radio and the ephemera of radio’s past, making it accessible to everyone.

Unlocking the Airwaves

Library of Congress Recorded Sound Division 

Columbia Radio Pioneers Project

Old-Time Radio Researchers

Old-Time Radio Researchers Collection at Internet Archives

World Radio History

If you want to recommend a resource, a book or a show on audio history that I missed, please put it in the comments below. The more of this stuff we share, the better.