Hello, Everybody!: The Dawn of American Radio

Long before the internet, another young technology was transformed--with help from a colorful collection of eccentrics and visionaries--into a mass medium with the power to connect millions of people.

When amateur enthusiasts began sending fuzzy signals from their garages and rooftops, radio broadcasting was born. Sensing the medium's potential, snake-oil salesmen and preachers took to the air, at once setting early standards for radio programming and making bedlam of the airwaves. Into the chaos stepped a young secretary of commerce, Herbert Hoover, whose passion for organization guided the technology's growth. When a charismatic bandleader named Rudy Vallee created the first on-air variety show and America elected its first true radio president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, radio had arrived.

With clarity, humor, and an eye for outsized characters forgotten by polite history, Anthony Rudel tells the story of the boisterous years when radio took its place in the nation's living room and forever changed American politics, journalism, and entertainment.

• Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio
• The Network: The Battle for the Airwaves and the Birth of the Communications Age
• Raised on Radio
• Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio
• Sound Reporting: The NPR Guide to Audio Journalism and Production
• Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool
• The Network: The Battle for the Airwaves and the Birth of the Communications Age
• The Man Who Came to Dinner
• Raised on Radio
• The Great American Broadcast: A Celebration of Radio's Golden Age