Missouri Valley Sundays

Drawing from copious research and interviews with principal participants for his new book Mafia Dreams: A True Crime Saga of Young Men at the End of an Era, author and former law enforcement officer Frank Hayde recounts the FBI’s efforts in the 1990s to stamp out the vestiges of organized crime in Kansas City.

In a special Missouri Valley Saturdays presentation, Suzanne Hogan, creator and producer of KCUR public radio’s A People’s History of Kansas City, discusses the 3-year-old podcast and its illumination of unexpected and forgotten stories from Kansas City’s past.

In a discussion of his new book The Girl with the Agate Eyes: The Untold Story of Mattie Howard, Kansas City’s Queen of the Underworld, journalist Dan Kelly recounts the colorful life of a women described in her day as the “most dangerous criminal ever in Kansas City.” Howard...

Tapping new resources and research tools, local historian Michael Sweeney has produced the first new historical assessment in 20 years of the undisputed father of Kansas City’s barbecue tradition, Henry Perry. Sweeney shares his findings, including new insights into the life and career of the man to wh...

There remains an aura around the Kansas City Monarchs, one of the most famous and successful teams in baseball’s Negro Leagues. Drawing from his book Black Baseball in Kansas City, Negro Leagues Baseball Museum co-founder Larry Lester discusses the Monarchs’ beginnings and ris...

West Bottoms Whiskey Co. founder Alex Lindsey examines a captivating element in the rich history of Kansas City’s West Bottoms: the distillation, distribution, and consumption of liquor. A master distiller, he discusses the p...

Drawing from her book Unorganized Women: Repetitive Rhetorical Labor of Low-Wage Workers, 1837-1937, the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Jane Greer looks at how women working at Kansas City’s Nelly Don Garment Company in the 1930s sought a collective identity as practical and comfortable as the garments they st...

Former Sumner High School band and orchestra teacher Leon Alexander Brady recounts an impactful career and its 1972 pinnacle: the Sumner stage band’s victorious performance in the Paris Jazz Internationale Festival, stamping it as the best in the world. He joins author Steve Penn in...

Lawrence, Kansas, photographer Ann Dean discusses the impact and inspiration found in three seminal books – The Learning Tree, A Choice of Weapons, and Half Past Autumn – by Kansas-born Black author, photographer, and filmmaker Gordon Parks, one of the most renowned docume...

Drawing from her KC 1900 blog series, local author and historian LaDene Morton details how Kansas City rallied from a devastating setback – a fire in April 1900 that destroyed the grand new convention hall set to house the Democratic National Convention. It was rebuilt in time to welcome 11,000 delegat...