podcasts Archive

May 11, 2009

Recently, history buffs and preservationists in Indiana have had the opportunity to unwrap a few gifts from the past.

May 4, 2009

While the nation celebrates the Lincoln bicentennial, 2009 also represents the two century-mark of another important event in the state where the President spent his boyhood. In 1809, Governor William Henry Harrison struck a monumental land deal with a consortium of native peoples. The Treaty of Fort Wayne, also known as “The Ten O’clock Line Treaty,” conferred three million acres of land to the settlers.

April 27, 2009

Although not associated with any specific school of psychological thought, Indiana University’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences was once home to the biggest name in behaviorism. Regardless of a lifelong affiliation with Harvard, B.F. Skinner did some of his most notorious work while chair of psychology at IU. An advocate of the idea that […]

April 20, 2009

Since 2003, Team Major Taylor has fueled competition at Bloomington’s annual Little Five Hundred bicycle race. The namesake of the racially diverse team was a hero from the golden age of cycling at the turn of the twentieth century. The glory was bittersweet, however, when considered in light of the enormous racial discrimination Marshall Walter Taylor had to battle along the way.

April 13, 2009

In college towns across Indiana, spring colors include the bright jerseys of determined-looking bike riders thronging the streets. An annual spring cycling event on the Indiana University-Bloomington campus that began as a fundraiser for working college students has gained national renown thanks to the beloved 1979 film Breaking Away . Inspired by the Indianapolis 500 […]

April 6, 2009

The story of modern art in the United States can not be told without acknowledging the role played by “Indiana’s wild bunch of gamblers in art.” Bound by a common “interest in contemporary art, together with a willingness to take chances” and to pay annual dues of $25, an Indianapolis-based group calling itself the Gamboliers […]

March 30, 2009

In two long-running newspaper columns and three books, IU graduate Rachel Peden dispensed lessons gleaned from a life lived in tandem with the land. Since 1952, the Children’s Farm Festival at the Peden Family Farm outside Bloomington continues to be a long-awaited spring tradition.

March 23, 2009

Talk of zoology at Indiana University often turns to a scholar whose research shifted from gall wasps to human sexuality, shaking the world in the process. Decades before Alfred Kinsey began his groundbreaking work, however, the IU Department of Zoology became noteworthy for another reason—also related to sex and gender.

Having earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in zoology, Effa Funk Muhse made history as IU’s first female Ph.D. when that same department awarded her the degree in 1908.

March 16, 2009

The third recipient of Indiana’s highest honor is neither a legendary coach nor a university president. Jane Blaffer Owen was presented with the 2007 Sachem Award in recognition of her philanthropic efforts in historic preservation and the arts. The Houston native is best known for her work to restore the southwestern Indiana town of New Harmony to the spirit in which it was founded.

March 9, 2009

The founder of Terre Haute’s CANDLES Holocaust museum was once the subject of medical experimentation by Dr. Josef Mengele, the infamous “Angel of Death.” Eva Kor, recipient of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Spirit of Justice Award and the Sagamore of the Wabash, among others, espouses a philosophy of forgiveness, a controversial position among survivors of the Holocaust.