By the 1930s, nearly everything we consider modern media programming was in place. The blend of news, education, sports, and entertainment was the substance of radio. From “The Lone Ranger“ to “Meet the Press,” the middle decades of the 20th century produced some of the finest presentations the public ever heard. Even Shakespeare enjoyed a renaissance over the airwaves. One bit of theatricality became the single most famous broadcast in American history. When Orson Welles’s production of “The War of the Worlds” concluded on 30 October 1938, a wave of mass hysteria seized thousands of radio listeners,” as The New York Times observed the next day.

The most popular show in this heyday era, however, was a situation comedy called “Amos ’n’ Andy.” The show, which premiered in 1929, starred two white actors playing black men. In the tale of this particular racial sore, the author shows his interior composure, as he does throughout the book when describing how people of all descriptions adapted themselves to intolerance. Benjamin Kubelsky and Nathan Birnbaum became Jack Benny and George Burns to accommodate an anti-Semitic environment; then they triumphed in radio. Women produced radio programming but largely chose to stand behind the curtains, from fear of prejudice. And black performers saw their contributions highlighted briefly, only to be crushed by racism. For most of the Golden Age of Radio, minorities were oppressed and violated; but their treatment only mirrored a nation’s self-loathing. Stunningly, stars such as Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway became icons of early radio but marginalized figures of its supposed zenith, supplanted by white competitors, such as Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller. Balk rightly describes the transition and frames it properly.

Without radio, America’s melting pot would never have reached a critical temperature. It really did boil over, though, and we are still living in its aftermath, for better or for worse. However, today, its cooling has left behind rigid formulas that hold us in their grip no matter where we search across the dial. Radio became what America is. We need to read more books such as The Rise of Radio to learn how it got there, because the future is as bleak as ever—and radio is as compromised as ever, with its corporate overlords dictating opinions.

But we have to try to think about how radio reflects our interests, not the other way around. The airwaves belong to us, as Balk’s book emphasizes, as does the government that administers them and the culture that responds to them. We may have botched radio as a medium in the past, but we are still responsible for its cultural significance, and Balk reminds us that we can regain all that we have lost. We just have to demand it from those who control its use.

As a journalist, Balk has written more than 100 articles for Harper’s, Reader’s Digest, and other publications. He has taught at Columbia and Syracuse universities. And, for the record, he is a former managing editor of IEEE Spectrum magazine. In The Rise of Radio, he compresses the immense history of the science and art’s growth into a wonderfully readable and well-documented compendium. You need not be a radiophile to appreciate its all-too-human tales of success and failure. You need only be interested in America.