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Commerce and Culture: Histories of Radio Sponsorship Yet to Be Written

Research into the roles, perspectives, and strategies of specific radio-era sponsors could provide new insights into the history of radio and American culture. I provide a brief overview of major tobacco, food, soap, and automobile sponsors and discuss the challenges of researching the role of corporations in American cultural history. With the aim of encouraging more scholarship, I suggest that analyzing radio sponsors could produce work on a variety of topics of broad interest, from the cultural history of cigarettes, promoted on dozens of tobacco-sponsored programs, to the representation of gender through sound on the Betty Crocker radio shows (1924–53).