Mo' Curious: Recent Episodes
KKFI Community Podcasts
The Recollection Agency is based in Missouri, a state with a wide and deep history. Having lived almost all of his years in the state, Trevor Harris remains inquisitive about the 24th state. As a way to marry that wonderment and the history all around him. Trevor started the Mo’ Curious podcast in 2020.
Each episode affords the hungry listener with a minor education in some noteworthy or forgotten piece of Missouri arcana.
Enjoy and share widely.
Before the Civil War, Missouri was territory where it was legal to own slaves. People could be bought and owned and sold. Amidst the horrors of enslavement, blacks and their allies in the region found ways to fight against the system that kept them in bondage.
Harriet Scott’s story is part of the National Park Service’s Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. She is buried in St. Louis’ Greenwood Cemetery. Credit: Greenwood Cemetery Preservation Association
On this episode of Mo’ Curious, we meet a group of historians and archivists who are researching the backstories of formerly enslaved people and are working to educate others about the lives they lived.
Lucille H. Douglass (at left) and Oralee McKinzy at the Parkville, Missouri Public Library in March 2023
Missouri history happened here. Right here. On this same ground on which we live today. That includes the history of slavery and racial segregation. When we tell the story of our state’s history, often the narrative is that of white and male Missourians. The family and personal stories of women and people of color are too often neglected when the narrative is told about the making of Missouri.
In this episode of Mo’ Curious meet two Kansas City women who are teaching themselves and others about local black history, which is, of course, Missouri history.
This episode’s guests are Oralee McKinzy who traces her family back to enslaved Missourians in Platte County, Missouri, and Lucille Douglass who recalls attending Parkville’s Missouri’s segregated black school as a girl in the 1950s.
As heard in this episode of the podcast:
Agriculture and Slavery in Missouri’s Little Dixie by R. Douglas Hurt
On Slavery’s Border by Diane Mutti Burke
Banneker School Foundation and Historic Site
Life 360 on Facebook
Dr. Jimmy Johnson in ‘History of Kansas City International Airport Land and Its People’ produced by the Kansas City MuseumThanks for listening to Mo’ Curious. Stay curious, Missouri.
Back in 1972, radio station KOPN was founded to serve the Columbia, Missouri area. The station was licensed for broadcast early the next year and now – over 50 years later – the community radio station that wasn’t expected to survive is still going strong.
In 2022, the KOPN Oral History Project captured memories from the station’s founders, former staff and long-time programmers. This podcast episode draws from those oral histories to tell a history of the station.
An history about the life and times of Columbia, Missouri’s community radio station, KOPN.Radio station KOPN is real and can be streamed here.
Thanks for listening to this podcast about the history of the 24th state. Catch more podcast episodes at MoCurious.com.
Stay curious, Missouri.
The Bosnian diaspora in St. Louis is preserving their culture while learning The American Way.
Over 60,000 Bosnian refugees and their children live in St. Louis area. They have a significant influence on the region’s economy, religious life and culture.
In this episode of the Mo’ Curious podcast we meet four Bosnians making sense of their past and mapping out their future as members of two cultures: Bosnian and American.
Here is the story of some of the Bosnians who now call St. Louis, Missouri home.More episodes of the podcast are available at MoCurious.com.
Thanks for listening and stay curious, Missouri.
In this episode, we listen to the oral histories of Margot McMillan. We hear from a river boat captain, a train engineer and an independent woman. These and several dozen other Missourians were the subjects of Margot's late 1970s oral history recordings. At that time, Margot was a young mother of two, a graduate student […]
On January 1, 1939, 1,500 Missourians went on strike. They were tired of hard work, being poor and living in shacks. This podcast explores what that strike means today to one Missouri community.
Back in 1939, the world was a different place. For one thing, there were a lot more people involved in farming. In Missouri’s Bootheel region, this meant bodies were needed to grow cotton. Under the sharecropper model, those Missourians who grew cotton had no guarantees of a wage. They could be evicted anytime from the […]
Madelyn Paine remembers getting weighed at the Dalton elevator. Diane Pippens feels her light skin helped her pass for white or Mexican when she integrated her town’s high school. William Payne recalls the town’s annual reunion where he met his future wife. It was at Dalton, Missouri’s annual reunion in 2021 that I did my […]
Almost as long as there has been a Missouri, there have been idealists in our midst. In 1844, “Doctor” Wilhelm Keil and his followers established the German Communal Society of Bethel in Northeast Missouri. They were followed by an Icarian outpost in 1858 near St. Louis. In this episode of Mo’ Curious by Missouri Life, […]
The stones that make up Missouri are old. Find out how old and how they came to be in this episode.
Mo’ Curious #4 draws on recent oral histories from a trio of long-time Kansas Citians. The episode is a cultural memory of Beacon Hill, an urban neighborhood in transition.