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The figure of Christopher Columbus was a key trope in the programming for the BBC's Latin American Service (LAS) and West Indian Service during the Second World War. This paper analyzes four dramas and one feature program from the 1940s that not only dramatize events from Columbus's life but also reflect the contemporary broadcast context by promoting British war interests and showcasing Latin American and Caribbean histories and geographies. These commemorative programs are broadly hagiographic, but they also reveal the BBC's awareness of how Latin American and West Indian audiences might variously respond to portrayals of Columbus and European colonization. Using radiogenic strategies including immersive aurality, the interplay of different historical narratives, and multivocality, these programs reveal the relationships between the BBC's institutional aims in overseas broadcasting and Latin American and West Indian program creators' literary and political goals. The portrayals of Columbus in the 1940s served an allegorical and ultimately propagandistic purpose, demonstrating the role of faith and perseverance amid turbulence and conflict, and inducing, by analogy, sympathy for Britain's war effort. The authors commissioned to write, produce, and deliver these dramas were not simply responding to propaganda guidelines; they were responding to the demands of the corporation and the war effort while also pursuing their own commitments and literary ambition. Ultimately, the scripts produced by the BBC for broadcast to the Americas reveal Columbus and his voyages as polysemic symbols of the regions' relationship to their past and their relationships to Europe in the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After World War II, British jazz fans and critics looking to better understand the genre stimulated a demand for blues records; this market expanded further as first Trad jazz, then skiffle and British R&B launched a British blues revival. Major labels like Decca and Pye offered major US urban blues and soul artists, but the specialty market, dominated by connoisseurs interested in a wider variety of artists and eras, was underserved by the major labels. Thus, committed blues lovers took matters into their own hands. This paper will survey the turbulent independent blues record scene in Britain from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, an ever-changing kaleidoscope of labels with colorful names, shadowy origins, lofty goals, and often surprising founders. Dozens of British musicians, critics, and collectors founded labels, licensing (or bootlegging) materials for reissue, importing 45s from the United States and reselling them in Britain, or recording new material for exclusive release. Many of these small concerns, reissuing rarities and recordings by artists outside the commercial mainstream, were labors of love rather than serious commercial enterprises. Their limited-edition discs were marketed directly to their target audience, and label owners rarely did more than break even. Most only issued a handful of recordings, though in the process they revived the stalled careers of US blues singers, provided much-needed income and support to older artists, and introduced Britain to a wider variety of blues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]