"Hearing Is Believing: Children, Disability, American Radio and Popular Culture, 1910-1970"

Walton O. Schalick, MD, PhD, assistant professor of Medical History, Rehabilitation, History of Science and Pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Using scripts, recordings and archival supporting documentation, Schalick explores the shifting, widespread and often dramatic appearance of disabilities in American radio culture in the 1910s–70s. What emerges is a provocative sense of how important this cultural medium was as a “backdrop” to the increasingly changing place of disability in American life, with children as one locus of that cultural uptake.