We are delighted to announce that Bootlegging the Airwaves: Alternative Histories of Radio and Television Distribution, by Eleanor Patterson, has won the IAMHIST-Michael Nelson Book Prize for 2025!
The prize committee found the volume original, engaging, as well as making a vitally important contribution to media and cultural history. The committee applauded the way in which author Patterson captured the passion and energy of an era of technological change, through use of rich archival sources and analysis of broadcast radio and television bootlegging between the 1960s and 1980s. Wonderfully written and engrossing in its depth of analysis, Patterson offers the reader key insights into the community of people who developed historic bootlegging practices to share pre-digital media with one another.
Publication details:
Eleanor Patterson, Bootlegging the Airwaves: Alternative Histories of Radio and Television Distribution (2024, Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press), ISBN: 9780252087691, paperback: $28. https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p087691.
The IAMHIST-Michael Nelson Book Prize
The call for submissions to the 2027 IAMHIST Michael Nelson Book Prize for the publication making the best contribution on the subject of media and history will open in Autumn 2026 (for books published between September 2024 and September 2026). Further details can be found here: https://iamhist.net/the-michael-nelson-and-christine-whittaker-prizes/.
