Michael Socolow

Michael Socolow’s talk, “The Pine Tree State on the National Airwaves,” details how the national, local, and regional radio businesses operated in Maine from 1920 to 1940. Socolow will delve into the dynamic by which certain shows and personalities from Maine – such as Rudy Vallee and Phillips Lord, who had top-rated NBC radio shows – became nationalized. He will also explore how some popular national radio shows became localized, such as when Jack Benny visited Dover-Foxcroft during World War II.

Michael J. Socolow is a media historian whose research centers upon America’s original radio networks in the 1920s and 1930s. His scholarship on media history has appeared in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, The Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Technology & Culture, and other scholarly journals. He is the author of Six Minutes in Berlin: Broadcast Spectacle and Rowing Gold at the Nazi Olympics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016). He is also a former broadcast journalist who has worked as an Assignment Editor for the Cable News Network. He has written pieces on media regulation and media history for The New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, Politico, Columbia Journalism Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Chronicle Review, and other outlets. He is Associate Professor of Communication and Journalism at the University of Maine. In July, 2020, Dr. Socolow was named Director of the McGillicuddy Humanities Center at the University of Maine.

This event will take place in the library’s Community Room, with limited seating. For more information or for Zoom links to watch from home, please email elewis@rocklandmaine.gov.