Welcome

Posted on December 1, 2020 | Leave a comment

Klaatu barada nikto

This site was for students and anyone else who might be interested in my historical work, but now also serves as information for my bid for Radford City Council. By way of introduction, here’s a photo taken by Linda Burton in the science fiction gallery of the Seattle Museum of Pop Culture. 

Gort the Robot, shown here, is from The Day the Earth Stood Still, a 1951 movie.  Despite the uncanny resemblance, I’m the handsome one on your right. The museum is  extremely cool, and if you don’t see it next time you’re in Seattle, Gort will know where to find you.

So — Why do historians  like science fiction?  It has something to do with what history is and what it ought to be.

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Posted in Media history

Blog posts: What’s a Wayzgoose?

Posted on August 24, 2025 | Comments Off on Blog posts: What’s a Wayzgoose?

August 24th  is the traditional holiday for  printers, editors, reporters, engravers and others working at a newspaper or printing company.

The Wayzgoose printers holiday was August 24

The centuries-old holiday has largely been forgotten in the late 20th century, but it was still very much alive a generation or two ago among printing unions in the UK.

The holiday has its origins in the feast day for St. Bartholomew, the patron saint of scribes and, later, of printers and writers.

The odd name for the holiday, Wayzgoose, refers to the centerpiece of this holiday meal: a goose that had been fattened on stubble (or wayz) from a harvested field of grain.

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Posted in Flashbacks

Farewell to John Fox

Posted on August 23, 2021 | Comments Off on Farewell to John Fox

John Fox did a lot at Radford, including service as a volunteer at WVRU.

John Fox was everybody’s friend at Radford, but anyone responsible for a Mac computer lab will tell you he was a lifesaver. Saint John of Cupertino, I once called him, and he said “pssshawww, Ive never even been there.”  And smiled that famous smile of his.

His death Aug 12, 2021, was unexpected.

I met John back in  the late 90s at a time when each department was responsible for its own set of those fragile little electronic boxes,  John was hired to be the IT guy for Mac computers, and one day he showed up with a pair of pliers and a multi-headed screwdriver. He asked how things were going,  and then sat around and fixed things and told jokes and passed along some wisdom of the digital kind, and otherwise.

One of his favorite tricks before we had individual screen logins in the labs  — Im sure this doesn’t matter now — was to use the number 1 as a password.  Imagine the time we’re saving, not having to key in complicated passwords, he would laugh. We could spend a weekend fishing with all this time we saved.  I was over in IT a few weeks ago in July, 2021, and told that story, and all the old timers broke out laughing. Yeah, that was John, they said. He was remembered fondly.

Which brings me to this story:   When we did start using full logins in the Media Studies Mac lab in the basement of Porterfield, suddenly, one day in early fall of 2003, nobody could log in. The spinning wheel  would just keep on spinning on the screen, and entire classes would go by, watching the little wheel. For anyone teaching with computers it was a very serious crisis, although the local department heads and sundry administrators found an endless source of humor in it all.

Using computers to teach photography and writing is just a crutch, they would sniff. Try teaching without the computers for a while, they would suggest helpfully, trying to hold back a schadenfreudian smile.

Digital photography and web design, which is what we actually were teaching,
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Posted in Around the U

How a silent movie informs the current debate over the right to be forgotten

Posted on March 11, 2021 | Comments Off on How a silent movie informs the current debate over the right to be forgotten

Illustration from the Red Kimono movie poster.

In 1915, Gabrielle Darley killed a New Orleans man who had tricked her into a life of prostitution. She was tried, acquitted of murder and within a few years was living a new life under her married name, Melvin. Then a blockbuster movie, “The Red Kimono,” splashed her sensational story across America’s silver screens.

The 1925 film used Darley’s real name and details of her life taken from transcripts of the murder trial. She sued for invasion of privacy and won.

In deciding in favor of Darley, a California court said that people have a right to rehabilitation. “We should permit [people] to continue in the path of rectitude rather than throw [them] back into a life of shame or crime,” the court said. It is a sentiment that is harder to put into practice today, when information is much more readily available. Nonetheless, policymakers and media outlets are looking at the issue.

As a scholar of media history and law, I see Darley’s story as more than an interesting slice of legal and cinematic history. Her case provides an early example of how private people struggle to escape their pasts and how the idea of privacy is linked to rehabilitation.

How The Conversation is different: All our authors are experts.

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Posted in Media history

That time private US media companies stepped in to silence the falsehoods and incitements of a major public figure … in 1938

Posted on January 18, 2021 | Comments Off on That time private US media companies stepped in to silence the falsehoods and incitements of a major public figure … in 1938

By Bill Kovarik
Published in The Conversation, Jan. 15, 2021
Creative Commons license for non-profit republication.

In speeches filled with hatred and falsehoods, a public figure attacks his enemies and calls for marches on Washington. Then, after one particularly virulent address, private media companies close down his channels of communication, prompting consternation from his supporters and calls for a code of conduct to filter out violent rhetoric.

Sound familiar? Well, this was 1938, and the individual in question was Father Charles E. Coughlin, a Nazi-sympathizing Catholic priest with unfettered access to America’s vast radio audiences. The firms silencing him were the broadcasters of the day.

As a media historian, I find more than a little similarity between the stand those stations took back then and the way Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have silenced false claims of election fraud and incitements to violence in the aftermath of the siege on the U.S. Capitol – noticeably by silencing the claims of Donald Trump and his supporters.

A radio ministry

Coughlin’s Detroit ministry had grown up with radio, and, as his sermons grew more political, he began calling President Franklin D. Roosevelt a liar, a betrayer and a double-crosser. His fierce rhetoric fueled rallies and letter-writing campaigns for a dozen right-wing causes, from banking policy to opposing Russian communism. At the height of his popularity, an estimated 30 million Americans listened to his Sunday sermons.

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Posted in Uncategorized

America's Content Farmers

Posted on July 11, 2020 | Comments Off on America's Content Farmers

EDUCATIONAL SHORT FEATURE
USDI, WASHINGTON DC, JAN. 22, 2020
“AMERICA’S CONTENT FARMERS — A READ APART”

(Music swells)
(Fade in “USDI Approved” logo)
(Shots of sunrise with topic silos in the background)
(Music fades)
(Cue announcer)

It’s dawn on the content farm, and the violent hues of night give way to the blood-read clouds of mourning.

From the barnes, you can hear the noble crowing of a booster and the clucking of the dickens. In the background there’s the sweet googling of journos, braying for their beats, while the bores grunt in their pens.

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Posted in humor

Letters to the science editor

Posted on January 31, 2020 | Leave a comment

Now that the average American has taken a  serious interest in science,  we’re seeing all kinds of new debates.  People  worry about radiative forcing and the use of the Stefan-Boltzmann constant in global climate models, among other things. So it’s not hard to imagine that there will be a lot more of this ersatz erudition in the media. Here are a few of the letters to the editor we will probably be seeing soon:

  • The so-called Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction theory is ridiculous!  Iridium does not kill dinosaurs !! Show me just one tiny bit of evidence that a dinosaur ever keeled over after being exposed to iridium! You cant, can you? Stupid ass scientists.   —  BJR, Lubbock, Tx.
  • It’s hard to believe anyone but an outright moron would accept the Kepert model as a modification of the valence shell electron pair repulsion theory. VSEPR theory is practically written in the Bible.  You will fry in hell, Kepert model fools! — TD, Richmond, Va.
  • Bateman’s biological principle is clearly an abomination in the sight of God. I cant tell you how repulsive it is to have this taught to my children in school.  If people didn’t believe in Bateman’s principle, biology teachers would be cast out of their lucrative $40,000 a year jobs.   When oh when will these lying scientists ever learn? — BZ, Bozeman, MT.
  • Quantum Field Theory? Ha! Just a plot by montrachet swilling mathematicians!   — YN, Portland, ME.
  • And that goes DOUBLE for the Banach–Tarski paradox!  — YN, Portland, ME.

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Posted in humor

Mainz – The city that invented modernity

Posted on May 14, 2018 | Comments Off on Mainz – The city that invented modernity


There is an endless fascination with Johannes Gutenberg, the impact of the printing press, and the town of Mainz, Germany where he grew up and began the world’s first major printing operation in the 1450s. You see it in the crowds making something of a pilgrimage to the Gutenberg Museum there, and you see it in the thriving city itself — the flower stalls, the cathedral, the students singing as they pedal the bicycle-powered beer wagons. Madhvi Ramani of the BBC captures this in a May 8, 2018 article, How a German City Changed How We Read, and quotes from my book Revolutions in Communication.
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Posted in Media history

Folding up the Confederate flag

Posted on December 13, 2014 | Comments Off on Folding up the Confederate flag

By Bill Kovarik 

They say that American Southerners are a lot like Japanese people – they drink a lot of tea, they eat a lot of rice, and they worship their ancestors.

Maybe that’s why the Confederate defenders today remind me of  Hiroo Onoda, who died last year in Tokyo.   Onoda was the Japanese Army officer who refused to surrender in 1945, at the end of World War II, and fought on in the remote jungles of the Philippines until 1974.

Links to Dan Smith's blog.

Confederate marchers. Roanoke. Dec. 12, 2014. Photo by Dan Smith.

The way they finally got Hiroo Onoda to surrender was to send his former commanding officer to the Philippines with a formal order telling him to cease all military activities.

Would that work, here in the former Confederate States of America?

Well, OK, here goes:

As a descendant of a Confederate colonel who perished in the Civil War, also known as the Recent Unpleasantness and the War of Northern Aggression,  I hereby order all descendants of Confederate veterans to cease all military and civic hostilities after the 150th anniversary of the surrender:  April 12, 2015.

There. That should do it.

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Posted in Flashbacks, Reflections