Week 11

Radio comes into the home, 1940s

Monday

READ Crowley & Heyer pp. 207–210 and 210–216

(1) What significance does the Titantic have to wireless telegraphy? Is our sense of the present a sequence of local events or a simultaneity of multiple distant events? How were early ideas about the use of the telephone different from what really happened?

(2) How did people "tune in to radio" in the 1920s? How was the diffusion of radio into popular use similar to the diffusion of personal computers in the 1980s and '90s? How was "DXing" like Web surfing? What other changes was North America experiencing in the 1920s?

> PowerPoint

Wednesday

VIDEO "Empire of the Air," 100 minutes, 1992
Director: Ken Burns

There will be questions about the video on Test 3. If you missed the video, you should get notes about it from another student.

OPTIONAL About the Film