Hometown History

Las Vegas, Nevada. How would you feel about pulling up a lawn chair to watch a nearby explosion of an atomic bomb? Believe it or not, this used to be common. When the U.S. government chose a nuclear testing site about 60 miles outside of Las Vegas, the city did what it did with just about everything else. It turned it into a marketing campaign. It used the proximity of these massive radioactive di...

Today, you go anywhere and you say, ah, I'm from Las Vegas. Whoa, really? And yet, to this day, people will say, what hotel do you live in? Are you kidding me? You've got 3 million people living here. Are you kidding me? No. And yet, I've had that. I've had people say, you run a museum there? What is it? About poker chips or something? No, it's a museum. I run three museums, or...

West Baden Springs, Indiana. After my conversation with Jeff Lane at the West Baden Hotel, I went over to the French Lake Hotel to meet Dan Fracher for a tour of both campuses. Because I've already covered the general history of the West Baden Hotel in our interview with Jeff, I'll be focusing on some of the quirkier or more detailed parts of the West Baden story during that part of the to...

West Baden Springs, Indiana. When it was built in 1902, with the biggest free-span dome in the world, the West Baden Springs Hotel in southern Indiana was known as the eighth wonder of the world. About a month ago, in February of 2023, the travel site TripAdvisor named it one of the top five hotels in America. TIMELINE 1901: and are still thriving today. 1902: And so, less than one year, this buil...

Mitchell, Indiana. The first man to walk on the moon died two years before he ever got there. Or at least, the man who was supposed to be the first. His name was Gus Grissom, and he is remembered today as one of the most skilled and yet unluckiest astronauts in the history of space travel. As a member of the Mercury Seven, also known as Astronaut Group One, Gus was among the elite of the elite. TI...

Baltimore, Maryland. I always tell people that I graduated from the hardest school to get into that was in existence in the United States at that time. They had statistically more people who would apply for clown college and certainly a much smaller pool of class than Harvard or Yale or any of the big Ivy League schools. So it was the hardest to get into. And I graduated from it. And then there I...

Terre Haute, Indiana. After leaving the Candles Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Terre Haute, Indiana, I mentioned our trip to a photographer friend of mine named Rodney Markison from nearby Bloomington. I was telling Rodney about a book I had purchased at the museum that was unlike anything I'd ever read. It was a biography of Eva Kaur, the founder of the Candles Museum, but it was il...

Terre Haute, Indiana. I'm back with Troy Fears, Executive Director at Candles Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Terre Haute, Indiana. Twenty years ago, this museum was firebombed by a domestic terrorist. Today, it's stronger than ever, hosting thousands of visitors every year, including school groups and educational workshops. Candles educates people on the Holocaust, but more speci...

Terre Haute, Indiana. I'm not sure what's going on. I'm not sure what's going on. I'm not sure what's going on. The fire was in the middle of the building. It took us about 35 to 40 minutes to bring the fire under control. On the north side of the building, the door had been knocked out prior to our arrival. At this time, the fire is under investigation. This museum was the...

Everglades, Florida. To my knowledge, only one Native American tribe in history has never surrendered or capitulated to the U.S. government. The Seminole tribe of Florida, most specifically one Seminole tribe, the Mickezuki Indians, settled in the Everglades and held out until 1962, until they were legally acknowledged as a sovereign domestic dependent nation by the United States government. TIMEL...

Bristol, Tennessee. Last month I was driving through a small downtown in northeastern Tennessee and realized that my two left tires were directly on top of the state line. On my right side was still Tennessee, but on my left side was the state of Virginia. The yellow line was the borderline. It occurred to me that these shop owners on opposite side of the street were not only in two different stat...

Brown County, Indiana. The turning point in history of most hometowns is economic. A factory moves in, or an industry moves in, and then thousands or millions of people follow. This episode is the story of a county in southern Indiana that was changed not through industry, but through art. It's the story of one well-known painter named T.C. Steele and his wife Selma, and how they almost single...

Leavenworth, Washington. but as you guys get out i start to hear gunfire like of a shotgun yeah and i was just like guys do you guys hear that but by that point in time you guys had already been in this gold fever and you guys are so determined you're like yeah i'm sure it's fine i think it was some people up on the hill target shooting they were shooting handguns or something like tha...

Bean Blossom, Indiana. I'll never forget the morning you left me, a big mistake you called on. If you come back, sunshine will fall, if you stay away, you'll get my phone. Sweet heart of mine, can't you hear me call? A million times above you been mistreated you, Lord, and I'm sorry. Come back to me is my request. Standing in the center of a music museum in southern Indiana, I'...

Abraham Lincoln spent fourteen formative years in Spencer County, Indiana, from age seven to twenty-one, in a period that would profoundly shape the character of America's sixteenth president. Between 1816 and 1830, Lincoln transformed from a frontier boy into a self-educated young man on the banks of Little Pigeon Creek, learning the values of hard work, compassion, and justice that would def...

In December 1816, seven-year-old Abraham Lincoln stood at the edge of the Indiana wilderness, watching his father Thomas swing an axe into frozen timber. The family had left Kentucky behind, fleeing land disputes and the shadow of slavery, to carve out a new life along Little Pigeon Creek in what would become Spencer County, Indiana. For the next fourteen years, this remote frontier homestead woul...

West Columbia, South Carolina. I'm back with Benny Sultan, Reverend Charles Jackson, and Keller Kisham to discuss the legacy of the 1963 South Carolina State Championship football team. In the last episode, we looked at the amazing on-field success of this team, which outscored its opponents 526-27 over the course of the season. This episode, we're going to focus more on the legacy of that...

West Columbia, South Carolina. It looked like sand. It looked like dirt. Absolutely. , they referred to it as the dust bowl, even when they played football back then. At the other end, you saw some rusted, dilapidated fencing. I look at it like this. It was a big part of the community, but it was a yard that was in disrepair, and it needed people coming together. And I'm putting their hearts t...

New Harmony, Indiana. Have you ever wanted to join a commune? Better yet, have you ever wanted to start a commune? Have you ever wondered how communes work, or how they feel, which they seem to inevitably do? If your answer is yes to any of those questions, this episode is for you. The founder of the Communal Studies Association, Dr. Donald Pitzer, is with me today. Dr. Pitzer also founded the Cen...

In January 1825, Welsh industrialist Robert Owen arrived in the small Indiana town that would become the epicenter of American utopian experimentation. Having purchased the entire community from George Rapp's Harmonie Society for $150,000, Owen envisioned transforming New Harmony into a model society based on cooperation, education, and equality. This ambitious social experiment attracted some...

New Harmony, Indiana. We're talking with Jennifer Green today, history professor at the University of Southern Indiana, and one of my all-time favorite guests. Jennifer also serves as the school's reference and archives librarian. I met Jennifer following a trip to a small town called New Harmony on the Indiana-Illinois border. New Harmony is without a doubt one of the strangest places I&#...

Wabash, Indiana. Long time listeners will know that I've been all over the country finding stories. From Florida to Washington State, from Texas to Minneapolis. All this time, there's been one at the end of my street. Literally, at the end of my street that I haven't covered. Two blocks from my office, a small circle of about a dozen log cabins marks the spot of an 1826 treaty between...

San Francisco, California. last episode we sat down with Brandon at the Beat Museum in San Francisco to learn more about the Beat Movement and the way it forever changed the way Americans have thought about not only literature but life itself. we're going to be looking specifically at the relationship between this movement and the city of San Francisco which has been home to so many interestin...

San Francisco, California. In high school, I read Jack Kerouac's novel, On the Road, like everybody else. Living in a small town outside Muncie, Indiana, Kerouac's sense of freedom and adventure appealed to me, as it has so many since its publication in 1957. So when we were in San Francisco this past spring, we stopped at the Beat Museum downtown to learn more about the movement Kerouac h...

Reno, Nevada. After our episode on The Conqueror's Curse, I invited Richard Marino back to the studio to talk more about the history of the city of Reno. In that earlier episode, we discussed the ill-fated Howard Hughes film, The Conqueror, that resulted in the eventual deaths of more than 30% of its cast and crew. Before visiting Reno this spring, my only exposure to this city had been the TV...