Artist Sean Fitzgibbon discusses his collaboration with writer Kevin Brown to create a documentary graphic novel about the historic Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. The novel is set in 1938 and 1939, the years the hotel was turned into a hospital under the direction of Norman Baker, a "doctor" claiming to have a cure for cancer. (56:58 minutes, 9.9MB, MP3)
Local musical group East of Zion Plus performs old-time songs from their family’s musical heritage. The band members are relatives of Alma Gilbert Allen, Helen Gilbert Fultz, and Phydella Gilbert Hogan, three sisters who grew up in the east Washington County, Arkansas, community of Zion. (52:59 minutes, 9.2 MB, MP3)
Dr. Brooks Blevins, professor of Ozark studies at Missouri State University, discusses his latest book, Ghost of the Ozarks: Murder and Memory in the Upland South. In 1929, in a remote county of the Arkansas Ozarks, the gruesome murder of harmonica-playing drifter Connie Franklin and the brutal rape of his teenaged fiancée captured the attention of a nation on the cusp of the Great Depression. National press from coast to coast ran stories of the sensational exploits of night-riding moonshiners, powerful "Barons of the Hills," and a world of feudal oppression in the isolation of the rugged Ozarks. The ensuing arrest of five local men for both crimes and the confusion and superstition surrounding the trial and conviction gave Stone County a dubious and short-lived notoriety. (1:10:14, 12.1 MB, MP3)
Alan Thompson, collections manager at Prairie Grove Battlefield State Park, presents an overview of the private lives of soldiers and civilians during the Civil War, including some incidents of local and regional interest. (29:29 minutes, 10.3 MB, MP3)
