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North Dakota is small and sparsely populated, but it has drawn a range of music acts over the years, some of them multiple times, with memorable shows. Some of those concerts have had attendance larger than some of North Dakota’s major cities.

“The Black Death,” as the bubonic plague was called, swept Europe in the mid-14th century and killed millions of people. Hundreds of years later, North Dakota also grappled with plague.

Wednesday, July 14, 2021 - Music host Scott Prebys visits with Geoffrey Littlefield, the author of “Nelson Riddle: Music With a Heartbeat.” Littlefield takes a deep dive into the genius of Riddle, with first-hand accounts from Riddle’s son and with never-before-seen photographs and anecdotes about Riddle’s experiences with legends such as Sinatra, Dean Martin, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and North Dakota’s Peggy Lee. ~~~ Chuck Lura shares a Natural North Dakota essay that explores the outdoor opportunities in the Devils Lake area. ~~~ We visit with the other finalist for the North Dakota Leopold Conservation Award, Lance Gartner. He runs Spring Valley Cattle in Morton County. ~~~ Increasingly, farmers don’t own the land they work. That’s particularly true in the country’s breadbasket, and that can have environmental consequences. Harvest Public Media’s Dana Cronin looked at farmland rental data to figure out how the system is impacting the land itself. As she reports, farmers who rent appear less likely to use conservation practices.

On this date in 1832, George Catlin wrote to the New York Commercial Advertiser from the mouth of the Yellowstone River, saying: “The health and amusements of this delightful country render it almost painful for me to leave it. The atmosphere is so light and pure that nothing like fevers and epidemics has ever been known to prevail here – indeed it is proverbial here that a man cannot die unless he is killed by the Indians. If the Cholera should ever cross the Atlantic, what a secure, and at the same time delightful refuge this country would be for those who would be able to reach it.”

Have you been hearing this bird song this summer? We have been hearing these calls frequently this summer emanating from a small thick stand of aspen and shrubs. It sounds like there are several birds in there. But occasionally we get the opportunity to see the source, which is a catbird, or gray catbird to be more precise. No doubt some of you recognized the song.

Thursday, July 15, 2021 - Nationally, about 4% of children live in households that do not include their parents. Most often, they’re with grandparents or other relatives. North Dakota is now offering a new program to provide support for those caregivers. Christiana Pond is the project navigator for “Kinship-ND.” ~~~ We share a clip from Sunday’s Great American Folk Show as we hear from the Irish duo “The Breath.” ~~~ Tom Isern shares a Plains Folk essay, “Swimming Under the Fire Hall. ~~~ Sue Balcom is here with another episode of Main Street Eats. Today’s topic is garden pests.

By the early 1900s, amateur mechanics in North Dakota were building their own motor cars and whizzing down dirt roads at the mindboggling speed of eight miles an hour. The other rage of the time was aviation. North Dakotans were in on that, too. In 1910, Archie Hoxey was created a sensation with the first successful North Dakota flight at Grand Forks. And there was Frances Klingensmith, the first woman in the state to get a pilot’s license. She gained national fame as a stunt pilot and a racer. Even more famous, Carl Ben Eielson is known for flying over the arctic ice caps.

Correcting myths and looking at the evolution of Native American identity over the last 400 years is the mission of The 400 Years Project, a pictorial collection of Native American life. It includes original photos, text essays and a digital library of Native photographers from the mid-1800s to the present. Project founders Sarah Stacke, Sheena Brings Plenty and Brian Adams want to address colonization while centering the Native voice.

Modern-day people usually don’t know much about oxen, unless they refer to someone as a “big ox,” or being “strong as an ox.” Some might know about Red River oxcarts or maybe Babe the Blue Ox’s statue in Bemidji.

On this date in 1907, the North Dakota School for the Deaf announced that the school had opened an exhibit at the Grand Forks Fair where students displayed examples of work including needlework, carpentry, and penmanship. The exhibit also featured photographs of the school.