Missouri Valley Saturdays

In the 1980s and ’90s, artists and creatives seeking affordable studio and gallery spaces began moving into old warehouse and storage buildings north of Union Station – now known as the Crossroads Arts District. Stephanie Leedy and her daughter Erin Woodworth discuss Leedy-Voulkos Art Center founder Jim Leedy’s influen...

Before he was known as "Wild Bill,” famed frontiersman and gunfighter James Butler Hickok spent three formative years as a young man in the Kansas City area. Drawing from his new book The Wanderer: James Butler Hickok and the American West, author Craig Crease separates the man from the myth.

Drawing from their respective books, KelLee Parr and Stephen Rowley share their personal connections to The Willows, the most prominent of Kansas City’s homes for unwed mothers in the early 1900s, and discuss the diverse destinies of adoptees and the bond they share. Both Parr and Rowley were born at The Willows – Rowl...

In a special Missouri Valley Saturdays discussion of her new book States of Swing: The History of the Kansas City Jazz Orchestra, 2003-2023, author Libby Hanssen spotlights the city’s premier big band of the past two decades. KCJO has preserved KC’s distinctive swing style of the 1930s and ’40s while also defining the...