Missouri Valley Sundays

America’s longest war began with an Apache raid and kidnapping of an Arizona rancher’s 12-year-old stepson in 1861. It would last more than a quarter of a century, the government waging a campaign to confine the various Apache bands to reservations. Geronimo’s surrender in 1886 finally signaled an end to a ferocious...

Faith healer? Fraud? Or both? The enigma that was Francis Schlatter emerged in the American West in the late 1800s. In looks, he resembled popular depictions of Jesus, and some said his very touch could heal everything from migraines and arthritis to blindness and cancer. Thousands flocked to him, first in...

From its early days as a cowtown – a jumping-off point to the West and shipping center for meat and wheat – Kansas City not only grew into a Midwest manufacturing and commercial hub. It also blossomed into a cultural center. During a time of rapid change in popular music, the sounds of military marches gave way in t...

In the fall of 1918, more than a million U.S. soldiers faced a better trained and more experienced German army on the Western Front of World War I. The Meuse-Argonne Offensive was the Americans’ largest and bloodiest campaign of the war, but the troops led by Gen. John J. Pershing were victorious and helped bring th...

Efforts to combat blight and “renew” Kansas City, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri, took off after the end of World War II, but the results were mixed. Visionary ideas often came at the expense of established neighborhoods, architectural landmarks, and a sense of community. Adding to the difficulty, the two cities...

As part of a yearlong, statewide Missouri Latinos initiative, the Kansas City Public Library is offering an array of special programming. Theresa Torres explores how the Guadalupanas, a religious organization of Mexican-American women, began a grassroots movement in Kansas City, Missouri, u...

Was the December 29, 1890, massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, an act of war? U.S. government officials deemed it such. Or was the killing of some 200 Lakota men, women, and children by Army cavalrymen an act of premeditated murder, as claimed by survivors, their descendants, and American Indian advocates?...

No other resident of Kansas City, past or present, has achieved the worldwide fame of Walt Disney. He created the animated Mickey Mouse and established a motion picture, TV, and theme park empire that has grown bigger and more lucrative in the 50 years since his death. Robert W. Butler, lo...

Thomas Hart Benton’s national notoriety – as one of the most visible and controversial American painters of the 1930s – has overshadowed his time as a Kansas City resident. Benton scholar Henry Adams, author of the new book Thomas Hart Benton: Discoveries and Interpretations...

Two metro-area landmarks, the stainless steel-spired Temple and the domed Auditorium, accentuate the world headquarters of the Community of Christ in Independence, Missouri. Formerly called the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the denomination emerged after the 1844 death of Mormon pro...