William James Ryan (1940- ) Papers (KC0457)
William James Ryan is a broadcast historian and professor emeritus of communication at Rockhurst University, Kansas City, Missouri. He was chair of the Department of Communication, and the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts at Rockhurst. He began the Kansas City Broadcasting Oral History Project in 1985, producing 100 oral history interviews with men and women who served a variety roles in Kansas City radio and television. These interviews constitute the Kansas City Broadcasting Oral History Collection at the Western Missouri Manuscripts Collection. He has been a member of the Oral History Committee of the American Journalism Historians Association, the Society for Professional Journalists, Missouri Broadcast Education Association, and the History Division of the Association of the Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication. He received the Missouri State Historical Society's Author's Award for “Which Came First?—65 Years of Kansas City Broadcasting,” Missouri Historical Review (1988). He has a chapter in Television in America: Local Station History from Across the Nation (Iowa State University Press, 1997), and nine articles in Historical Dictionary of American Radio (Greenwood, 1998). He has presented scholarly papers on local African American broadcasters, the trend-setting Nighthawks radio orchestra, and the agenda-setting role of Northern Ireland newspapers.
The collection consists of research material and manuscripts of William Ryan’s book on the history of radio and television broadcasting in the Kansas City region. It also includes cassette tapes and transcripts of a 1985 oral history project he conducted. 1914-1996.
9 cubic feet, 1 oversize box.
Papers by William Ryan:
African-Americans in Local Broadcasting: Kansas City, 1922-1982
This paper is derived from a presentation to the 77th Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History, Kansas City, Missouri, October 9, 1992.
Reporting the ‘51 Flood:
An Oral History of the Impact of a Natural Disaster on Local Broadcast News
This paper is derived from a presentation to the American Journalism Historians Association Annual Meeting, Lawrence, Kansas, October 1-3, 1992.
Elinor
Fox
and
WHB’s Wartime
Programming
Kansas City’s pioneer WHB is an example of how local radio could offer opportunities for innovative programming developed by an energetic career-minded woman in the late 1930s and how her responsibilities increased as men left for the military while the station adapted to a wartime mode. Placed in the context of WHB’s wartime programming, this paper uses oral history research with Elinor Fox Kamen to tell how she entered radio just before World War II, wrote, produced and announced her own new programming ideas during the war and then moved out of broadcasting after the war.
Submitted to the Association of Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication Midwest Journalism Conference, April 8-9, 1994, Columbia, Missouri.
© WHMC-KC, University of Missouri
updated:
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
Western Historical Manuscript Collection-Kansas City
(816) 235-1543 WHMCKC@umkc.edu