Moment of Indiana History is a weekly two-minute radio program exploring Indiana History. The series is a production of WFIU Public Radio in partnership with the Indiana Public Broadcasting Stations (IPBS).
Despite a constitutional ban on black immigration into Indiana after 1851, Union Township in St. Joseph County, was the destination for a number of free blacks from Virginia and the Carolinas. The historical record of the African-American settlement at Union Township contradicts the image of life under state-sanctioned segregation.
When Indiana became part of the United States, the territory came under the governance of the Ordinance of 1787, whose sixth article outlawed slavery. With no cheap labor, however, many in the territory thought slavery necessary.
Dependent on transfusions of blood-clotting factor to live a normal life, at the age of 13 Kokomo native Ryan White became ill with pneumonia after a contaminated transfusion. During a partial-lung removal, White was diagnosed with AIDS, and given six months to live.
Instead, White recovered from pneumonia, and tried to re-enroll in school.
Now known as the Indianapolis International Airport, the facility once went by a different name. From 1944 to 1976, it was known as Weir Cook Municipal Airport, in honor of a WW1 flying legend. When a new passenger terminal was completed in 2008, the Veterans Coalition of Indiana demanded that the fighter pilot’s name be restored.
Nestled within Lagrange County, Shipshewana, Indiana is the third largest Amish and Mennonite community in the United States. Attracted by the promise of inexpensive property, early 19th-century Amish settled lands acquired as part of the Louisiana Purchase, assembling a small town only a few miles south of where the Potawatomi had been.
Adapting L’Enfant’s scheme for Washington, Alexander Ralston planned Indianapolis as a city block one square mile in area with a circle at its center, from which four diagonal roads extended radially outward.
Discouraged from marrying so as not to curtail their creativity, the Overbeck sisters of Cambridge City launched their ceramics enterprise as a way to establish economic independence. In 1911, their timing was fortuitous. Having flowered in England, the Arts and Crafts Movement held sway on the American decorative arts scene.
The merits of a 6’3” sophomore from Shelbyville were well established—Bill Garrett was named Indiana Mr. Basketball 1947 after having led the Golden Bears to the state title. But Garrett was African American, and as such, unofficially barred from Big Ten play.
When, on October 12, 2009, Elinor Ostrom received an early morning phone call from Stockholm, the Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science became the eighth Indiana University professor to be awarded the Nobel Prize.
IU’s first female Nobel Laureate, Ostrom is the first woman in the world to win the Swedish prize in Economics.
WFIU HD1 
Subscribe to the Moment of Indiana History Podcast
