Review and Criticism: Invited Essay—Where Have All the Historians Gone? A Challenge to Researchers

Abstract

Although Americans have enjoyed radio for 85 years and television for 65, we find that the overall historical record of this pervasive industry remains appallingly sparse. We argue here for a renewed historical research effort into some important but neglected topics in broadcasting, and specifically in radio. And we suggest only some failings, by no means all of them. There is a world of historical opportunity out there. Only with a fuller picture of the industry's development can we fully understand what happened then--and is happening today. Some versions of media are readily available. There are countless popular fanzine articles and quickie books, usually heavy with pictures, on many popular television series and actors. Old-time radio was similarly recorded, both when it was new as well as since, both literally and historically. In comparison, the closely allied field of motion pictures has been exhaustively surveyed on all levels--and continues to be (for reasons noted below). Yet approaching four decades after publication of his final volume, Erik Barnouw's classic trilogy (Barnouw, 1966-1970) remains our historical bedrock despite the fact that so much more has become available (and, contrarily, has been lost as well) since he researched and wrote his volumes. Closer examination shows that we lack, for example, scholarly biographies of most important technical innovators and business leaders, and precious few serious case studies, let alone histories, of major (let alone lesser) radio and television (or cable) companies. Too often overlooked as well are some of broadcasting's more compelling program genres. How can we effectively learn from the past if we lack much of a record of what that past was? The need for further historical research is both deep and wide. To cite one glaring example, we lack a scholarly history of even one of the national networks, let alone a careful assessment of all of them (a partial exception is found in Bergreen, 1980). As to biography, we do not even have (at least in English) a really solid biography of Marconi! Although the researcher seeking program or social history will find a growing number of books and even more articles (some quite good, and providing important starting points; for surveys, see Keith, 2006, and Sterling, 2006), the scholarly record concerning biographies and company histories is amazingly thin. Helping to underline the seriousness of the problem is the fact that we know more about key 19th-century figures in the telegraph and telephone--such as the telegraph's Samuel F. B. Morse, and the telephone's Alexander Graham Bell, both of whom have excellent biographers (Bruce, 1973; Silverman, 2003). Although we lack good histories of most telecommunications companies, a few exceptions stand out--a fine recent history of Western Electric (Adams & Butler, 1999), for example, or the company-sponsored history of MCI through 1988 (Cantelon, 1993). The historical picture becomes even more dubious when our situation in America is compared to Britain or Europe. Look, for example, at the fine (though company-sponsored) histories of such firms as Ericsson (Meurling & Jeans, 2000). Few American corporations can point to similar records. Often noted before, Lord Asa Briggs's magisterial five volumes on the BBC (Briggs, 1961-1995), carrying that story to 1974, are a model of carefully detailed institutional history. Even Britain's newer commercial television system, now a half century old, has been documented in six scholarly volumes (Bonner, 1998; Potter, 1989-1990; Sendall, 1982-1983). So have many of the key figures in British broadcasting, past and present, especially Lord Reith (e.g., McIntyre, 1993). What, then, is wrong here? Despite careful historical training of several generations of scholars, the development of useful historical models both here and abroad, the appearance of more media research journals, and the development of countless archives (many of them, it would seem, virtually untouched), why do we make such a poor showing when it comes to electronic media biography and company history, among other topic categories? …