Moment of Indiana History
podcasts Archive
October 13, 2008
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John Mellencamp
A pop radio staple for three decades, Grammy-award winner John Mellencamp was officially inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March 2008. A native of the Jackson County town of Seymour, which would be immortalized as the “ Small Town” of his eponymous 1985 hit, Mellencamp took a two-year degree from Vincennes University and left for New York City in 1975.
October 6, 2008
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James Watson
Growing up in Chicago, James Watson was into watching birds– and matching wits on the popular syndicated radio and TV series, Quiz Kids . Even with all this extracurricular activity, Watson managed to graduate from high school at age 15, issuing directly into the University of Chicago in 1943.
October 6, 2008
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Hoosier Gold
When “Baltimore Bullet” Michael Phelps won his eighth gold medal in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, not only his competitors were left in his wake. With this accomplishment, the swimming champion set a new record for number of first-place wins in a single year’s Olympic Games.
September 29, 2008
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Evansville African American Museum
With its spacious dimensions, pleasant views and various amenities, Lockefield Gardens in Indianapolis distinguished itself among housing projects erected in the 1930s under President Franklin Roosevelt’s Public Works Administration.
September 22, 2008
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Sandy Allen
Although she inhabited the upper reaches, Sandy Allen was remarkably down-to-earth. Recognized by Guinness World Records as the World’s Tallest Woman in 1975, the Shelbyville resident held that title until her death August 13, 2008.
September 15, 2008
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Conn Instruments
As another outdoor concert season draws to a close, it’s a good moment to reflect—as shiny brass instruments tend to do—on the origins of the band instrument industry and the band movement in the U.S.
September 8, 2008
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Peaceful Valley
Having marked Nashville’s centennial as “The Art Colony of the Midwest” in 2007, it’s easy to forget that the Brown County village was not always the epicenter of the visual arts in Indiana. A significant regional school of painting developed in the Wayne County town of Richmond in the late nineteenth century, of which the Richmond Palette Club and the Richmond Prize were manifestations.
August 25, 2008
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Art Colonies of the Midwest
In 1900, T.C. Steele’s landscape The Bloom of the Grape , painted on-site in Indiana’s Muscatatuck Valley just a few years earlier, won an honorable mention at the Paris Universal Exposition. The painters who were putting Indiana on the map at the turn of the twentieth century were members of a transitional generation.
August 18, 2008
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Midwestern Impressionism
When T.C. Steele and colleagues returned to Indiana in the mid-1880’s after studying at Munich’s Royal Academy of Painting, their canvases evinced the tonal realism they’d absorbed there.
August 11, 2008
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Hoosier School’s German Roots
The dappled light and broken brushstrokes of the landscape paintings that belong to the Hoosier School seem indebted to the French movements of impressionism and post-impressionism. But the paintings’ true background is more precisely German.
