In this episode, our guest is Vivian Gibson, author of The Last Children of Mill Creek and proof positive of the importance of telling your story. The book came out in 2020, amid the craze of the COVID19 pandemic, and has since grown to be a must-read. Mill Creek Valley was a segregated Black community in St. Louis city that was labeled "blighted" and razed for urban development in the late 1950s. Vivian’s book set out to humanize the people, stories, and places of Mill Creek through the eyes of her childhood. This is Gibson’s first book, and though it started as a retirement project, the momentum of the book ensured Gibson would not be slowing down any time soon.

While we commemorate 250 years of American History, we're reminded of the people and stories who were here before the establishment of the United States. For this conversation, we're joined by Dr. Angela Cooper, Site Services Specialist at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, to discuss a place that was once one of the biggest civilizations in North America, home to the Mississippian people and the largest pre-Columbian earthworks in the Americas.

In this episode, we’re thrilled to dive into a conversation about a true Missouri legend, Samuel Clemens, aka the one and only Mark Twain. Twain is someone who has undoubtedly contributed to the nation’s literary legacy and helped so many of us better appreciate the written word. To help us learn more about this Missouri icon, we talked with Megan Rapp from the Mark Twain Museum in Hannibal, Missouri.