The Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast
The Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast
Latest Episodes
The First People of the Mississippi Valley, Part 2: A Big Bang and First Contact
A thousand years ago, the largest city north of Mexico rose from the floodplain across the river from present-day St. Louis. In part two of our look at Native America along the Mississippi, we trace Cahokia's explosive birth around 1050 CE — a ...
The First People of the Mississippi Valley, Part 1: Creation, Mounds, and the Path of Souls
In this episode (part one of a two-part series), we trace the first ten thousand years of human life along the Mississippi Valley: who came here, what they built, and what we think they believed about the world they were living in.We sta...
The American Bottom In Focus, with Photographer Jennifer Colten
The area we call the American Bottom is a widening in the Mississippi River floodplain that runs some 70 miles in Illinois from Alton to the mouth of the Kaskaskia River just north of Chester. Just across the river from St. Louis, the area has ...
From Great Sewer to Great River: How the Twin Cities Brought a Dead Mississippi River Back to Life
A hundred years ago, the Mississippi River that ran through Minneapolis and Saint Paul was basically a dead river. Factories, people, and local governments dumped sewage and industrial waste into the river until it was a slimy, fetid mess incap...
Deep Time on the Mississippi: The River's Geologic Origins and Future with Roy Van Arsdale
How do you tell the story of a river that's tens of millions of years in the making? In Episode 79, I sit down with Dr. Roy Van Arsdale, Professor Emeritus at the University of Memphis, to trace the deep geologic history of the Mississippi Rive...
