Growing up I was surrounded by ghosts and the public memorialization of the Eurocentric past (American Revolutionary War fife-and-drum corps and Minute Men re-enactors). It took education and painful effort to face up to the violence, erasures, and lingering trauma underpinning the celebrations of local history. The removal and suppression of indigenous peoples, settler colonialism, and the fortunes grown throughout the Northeast through global trafficking of sugar, cotton, and slaves. In the suburbs, I rode the bus with a kids whose parents were immigrants hailing from faraway places (Uruguay, China, Germany, Holland, Japan). Their families had been touched by the violent wars of the twentieth century and were lucky to have made it to New England Rte 128 was a late-twentieth-century tech alley. Many of these folks had come to pursue opportunities in data processing, defense, or higher education. Many were also responsible for spawning a generation of frustrated Red Sox fans crushed by the ‘Curse of the Bambino,’ and far removed from childhood when the Bosox finally prevailed (repeatedly) in October. We were doomed to wasted Sunday afternoons as the truly horrible New England Patriots bumbled around the field, all this years before Tom Brady was a twinkle in his parents’ eyes.
I worked for Bill Moyers and Joan Konner at WNET/Thirteen in New York City on “The World of Ideas,” a PBS series of one-on-one interviews of luminaries in the arts and sciences. Moyers also put together “Listening to America,” a live weekly program running during the 1992 presidential campaign. In Bill (he refused to be called ‘Mr. Moyers’), I found a lifelong role model–a brilliant, accomplished doer, who was imperfect and human, but never stopped fighting as a journalist for educating the public and using his talents in uplifting and selfless ways. He’d take a call from Jackie O and then walk down the hall to ask our administrative assistant how her weekend had gone. I apprenticed with a cohort of excellent journalists and producers who shared Bill’s passion for quality, integrity, ethics, kindness, and having fun after the work was done. I met Gail Pellett, and Stanley Nelson, who has gone on to be one of the best documentary filmmakers of his generation, as well as the quietly brilliant Lynn Novick, who also went on to make award-winning documentaries for Ken Burns. In between projects, I freelanced media work around NYC, including with NPR’s “Heat,” a brash, live, nightly national politics and culture radio program that always featured a live musical guest in the studio. Lucky me.
On to Chicago! My Ph.D. thesis in history from the University of Chicago became my first book: Sounds of Reform: Progressivism and Music in Chicago, 1873-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2003). It analyzed the cultural politics of what I described as “musical progressivism” — efforts by activists in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Chicago to enlist music in assimilation and Americanization projects geared toward immigrant, ethnic, and working-class urban dwellers—and the countering practices of resistance and accommodation to, and negotiation of, such projects by Chicagoans themselves. I argued that musical progressivism marked a modern shift in the politics of everyday music in public spaces of the city that expanded the aesthetic vocabulary of civic life, and altered the dynamics of urban public space going forward.
I moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan to take a position in the University of Michigan’s Communication Studies Department (now Communication and Media). Inspired and mentored by remarkable colleagues in a number of departments, my research interests developed to include the social and cultural history of media and communications in the U.S. from the late nineteenth century to the present, the transnational culture and politics of broadcasting, sound studies, and the cultural history of American music, media, and technology. Across the Waves: How the United States and France Shaped the International Age of Radio (University of Illinois Press, 2017) looked at the emergence of radio broadcasting as a transatlantic technological, social, and cultural medium linking France and the U.S. in the twentieth century. My current research project is dedicated to the local history and politics of legacy media in an era of digital transformation and flux in the ecology of news and information.
