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Tuesday, July 12, 2022 - Small towns are known for people stepping up and helping out. Sometimes it’s for a health crisis, sometimes it’s new jerseys for the local team. A group of friends from Velva, about 20 miles southeast of Minot, wanted to take the spirit of giving to the realm of charitable gaming. They started the Aggie Foundation. We visit with board president Terry Peterson. ~~~ The agriculture industry accounts for ten percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. And yet, polls show that most conventional farmers in the Midwest don’t believe humans are the cause of climate change. Harvest Public Media’s Dana Cronin reports on a program that finds some common ground. ~~~ Tom Isern has a Plains Folk essay titled “Cattle King’s Prayer.” ~~~ The pandemic hit gig musicians pretty hard. Some help came from American Rescue Plan money. Special contributor Brandi Malarkey introduces us to Jerry and Friends, a trio of accordion players who used the funds to pivot to Facebook live.

The introduction of television in the fifties changed the way Americans spent time in their homes. While TV entertainment was a leap forward from the earlier fascination of radio, viewers were often familiar with personalities who had been successful on radio, or even earlier in vaudeville acts.

In our state, as elsewhere, there are internationalists who believe the U.S. should be deeply involved in foreign affairs; and isolationists, who do not believe the U.S. should be heavily involved with nations that don’t want anyone telling them what to do. In the 1930s, the prevailing mood was isolationist – that the U.S. should not intervene as the winds of war swept over Europe and Asia.

This week, Matt reviews the latest film from acclaimed director Jordan Peele.

Without doubt the most famous song of the Dust Bowl is Woody Guthrie’s ballad, “Dust Bowl Disaster.” Writing from the vantage of Pampa, Texas, he sings, “On the 14th day of April in 1935 / There struck the worst of dust storms that ever filled the sky.”

Seth Bullock arrived in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, on this date in 1876. Bullock’s history as Deadwood Sheriff and U.S. Marshal was featured in the HBO television series, "Deadwood," but his lasting legacy on Dakota Territory is much more legendary than his portrayal in the television show.

Five thousand Indians of the Sioux nation gathered in 1888 for discussions on a treaty that would open up land in the Standing Rock reservation for non-native settlement. The government was represented by three commissioners who needed three-quarters of all adult Lakota males to approve the treaty. Today marked the eleventh day of discussions, and the commissioners had yet to gather a single signature.

I have been reading Theodore Roosevelt’s “Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail.” It is an interesting read about life in the North Dakota badlands in the 1880s. In chapter three, The Home Ranch, Roosevelt describes the quiet surrounding the ranch: “There are few sounds to break the stillness. From the upper branches of the cottonwood trees overhead, whose shimmering, tremulous leaves are hardly ever quiet, but if the wind stirs at all, rustle and quiver and sigh all day long, comes every now and then the soft, melancholy cooing of the mourning dove, whose voice always seems far away and expresses more than any other sound in nature the sadness of gentle, hopeless, never-ending grief.”

Friday, July 29, 2022 - Lots to talk about on this month’s Journalists Roundtable. Along with news director Dave Thompson, we’re joined by special guests Dave Kolpack of the Associated Press; reporter Charles Crain of the Minot Daily News; and Hope Sisk of KFYR TV. ~~~ Matt Olien reviews “Nope.” It should be fun to hear about this “new kind of blockbuster” from acclaimed director Jordan Peele.

Monday, August 1, 2022 - For a woman traveling without her husband in the late nineteenth century, there was only one reason to take the train all the way to North or South Dakota. These new states on the frontier offered a tempting freedom: divorce. We visit with April White, author of “The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier.” ~~~ Chuck Lura shares a Natural North Dakota essay on Mourning Doves. ~~~ North Dakota native Ilonna Pederson is the founder and director of the New York Kammermusiker double reed ensemble. The group is making its 15th visit to North Dakota this week. Ilonna joins us for a preview.