Missouri Valley Sundays

Not only is Kansas City home to world-class art museums, outstanding performing arts venues, and some of the planet’s best barbecue, it also boasts superb works of stained glass created by both world-renowned craftsmen and gifted local artisans. The windows provide a colorful palette of our largely black and...

Kansas City’s Union Station opened 100 years ago next month, a grand, 850,000-square-foot edifice that saw as many as 678,000-plus rail passengers pass through its doors in 1945. After falling into disuse and decay, it was restored and reopened in 1999 in all its original Beaux-Arts splendor – as home to theaters, m...

Fifty years ago, in September 1964, The Beatles appeared – some say flopped – at Kansas City’s Municipal Stadium. Charley Finley, controversial owner of the Kansas City Athletics baseball team, enticed the Fab Four to perform at the old ball field for a then astronomical $150,000 fee! The show barely drew 20,000 fan...

Historian Petra DeWitt examines the suspicions and hostilities faced by Missouri’s sizable German American population during World War I, including questions about loyalty and an effort to ban the German language in the state.

On October 21-23, 1864, a Confederate army led by General Sterling Price clashed with its Union counterpart commanded by General Samuel Curtis. The immediate results of this large-scale battle, called by some the “Gettysburg of the West,” were a decisive Union victory and Price’s ignoble retreat from Missouri for th...

Postcards were the “instant messages” of their day, a means of communicating hometown pride, civic identity, and a visitor’s curiosity. But where today’s electronic missives disappear with a click, the images and notes on vintage postcards endure – doorways to lost worlds. Steve Noll, executiv...

A now forgotten advertising slogan once proclaimed that Kansas City — proud of its “cowtown” heritage — was “where the steak is born.” Local food critic Charles Ferruzza explores our town’s carnivorous proclivities, connecting the historical and cultural dots between the iconic Ka...

The 1876 raid by the James-Younger gang on Northfield, Minnesota, may be the most famous bank robbery in history. Recognizing what was happening, citizens armed themselves. Leaving the bank, the outlaws ran into a devastating hail of bullets. Two died in the street. The survivors, several badly wounded, fled N...

On a cold day in December 1890, near a creek called Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, the U.S. Army’s 7th Cavalry opened fire on an encampment of Sioux Indians. The ensuing massacre claimed more than 250 lives, including many Native women and children. In a discussion of his new book...

After the deaths in the early 1950s of botanist T.J. Fitzpatrick and his wife, a treasure trove of rare books was found in their modest home in Lincoln, Nebraska. Retired KCPL librarian Sherrie Smith traces the strange history of these early 20th century “hoarders,” who amassed a fabulous coll...