This podcast features 5 pieces:
You are now embarking on a perilous course
First Lady Louann Hoover had refused to invite black Congressman Oscar De Priest’s wife, Jessie Williams De Priest, to the White House to have tea with the spouses of other Republican Congressmen. How one Virginia congressman responded to the brouha.
What better place to hold a June wedding than next to a roller coaster? Chester, WV in the early 20th century didn't have 6 amusement parks to choose from, the way nearby Wheeling did. But what it lacked in quantity, it made up in quality.
Gourd design today mainly encompasses the arts and crafts world of vases, pots, and plates, but it has a politicized function in Cherokee history. Highly stylized gourd masks have for hundreds of years been an essential part of the Booger Dance, a charged ritual of reaction against outsider intrusion.
Chattanoogan Anna Safley Houston (1876-1951) single-handedly amassed thousands of pitchers, creamers, lamps, flasks, jugs, china, tea sets, platters and frilly art-glass baskets. Her collection of pitchers alone is thought to be the largest in the world. But she had some personal quirks that the neighbors noticed early on.
It was the centerpiece of the Montreal Expo of 1967: Buckminster Fuller's Geodesic Dome, a vaulted structure made of lightweight materials that form interlocking polygons.
Nineteen years before that majestic statement, Fuller, an architect, author, designer, futurist, inventor, and visionary, had gathered a group of students together at Black Mountain College in Bunscombe County, NC to make the leap from theory to reality and construct the first full-scale geodesic dome.