Dr. Joel Rhodes
Host - Sesquicentennial Moments, Telling HistoryJoel P. Rhodes is a Professor in the History Department of Southeast Missouri State University. Raised in Kansas, he earned a B.S. in Education from the University of Kansas before earning his M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
His teaching and research interests are in Cold War-era American political and social history and the history of children and childhood. Dr. Rhodes has written The Sixties in the Lives of American Children: Growing Up in a Land Called Honalee, The Voice of Violence: Performative Violence as Protest in the Vietnam Era, and A Missouri Railroad Pioneer: the Life of Louis Houck. An avid storytelling enthusiast, he has also written Haunted Cape Girardeau: Where the River Turns a Thousand Chilling Tales and co-authored Historic Cape Girardeau: an Illustrated History. His articles and chapters have appeared in On the Ground: The Black Panther Party in Communities Across America, Girlhood in America: An Encyclopedia, and the Missouri Historical Review. Dr. Rhodes has also delivered papers at the American Historical Association (AHA) annual meeting, and international conferences hosted by the Society for the History of Children and Youth (SHCY) and the Society for the Study of Childhood in the Past (SSCIP). He is currently researching and writing a book on the Vietnam War in the lives of American children.
Dr. Rhodes serves, or has served, on a number of Boards of Directors including the Missouri Humanities Council, the State Historical Records Advisory Board (appointed by Governor Jay Nixon), Missouri Association for Museums and Archives, National Digital Newspaper Program in Missouri Advisory Board, Colonial Fox Theatre Foundation (Pittsburg, Kansas), The Historical Association of Greater Cape Girardeau, The Stars & Stripes Museum/Library Association, and co-produced the Cape Girardeau Storytelling Festival.
He lives in Cape Girardeau with his wife Jeanie and his three children.
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July 26 is National Disability Independence Day, the culmination of a month-long annual commemoration celebrating the anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. This milestone was a watershed toward equality and accessibility, transforming both lives and attitudes. -
“You’re condemning this whole planet to a war that may never end,” Dr. Leonard McCoy chastised Captain James T. Kirk, in the 1968 Star Trek episode “A Private Little War.” “It could go on for year after year, massacre after massacre.” Broadcast twice in the science-fiction series’ second season, “A Private Little War” is one of Star Trek’s four explicit allegories on the Cold War logic driving American involvement in the Vietnam War. -
“If anyone asks you what kind of music you play, tell him ‘pop.’ Buddy Holly warned a fellow musician. “Don’t tell him ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ or they won’t even let you in the hotel." -
Whether shake, shake, shaking your booty in satin hot pants or physically spelling out YMCA in a double-knit polyester leisure suit, Americans in the 1970s feverishly danced away countless Saturday nights under a dazzling mirrored ball. A veritable disco inferno. -
“With a Ranger’s hat and shovel and a pair of dungarees, you will find him in the forest always sniffin’ at the breeze.” He’s Smokey Bear. Celebrated in song and story for 80 years now, Smokey Bear is the anthropomorphic face of the United States Forest Service, and the agency’s educational crusade against accidental wildfires; the longest-running public service advertising campaign in our history. -
“Remember what to do friends, now tell me right out loud, what are you supposed to do when you see the flash? Duck and Cover.” For Cold War youth, these sobering instructions from a cautious cartoon turtle named Bert were the cornerstone of the Federal Civil Defense Administration’s initiatives to prepare children for, and survive, a pending nuclear war. -
Raised largely on garden hose water and limited parental supervision, there is a generation of Americans tucked rather indifferently between baby boomers and millennials. Demographers call this cohort of 60 million born between 1965-1980, Generation X. Educators referred to millions of Gen X as latchkey kids, students returning to an empty house with a key to let themselves in. Working parents indeed mostly left us alone – afterschool, weekends, and summers – so we fended for ourselves, self-reliant, and let's be honest, kind of feral. -
On the eve of the bicentennial, KRCU crackled to life on March 5, 1976, an alternative music college station powered by student on-air personalities and 10 watts. Which meant that the station’s limited daily broadcast schedule carried from its tower on Academic Hall all the way to Capaha Park. -
“I’m not trying to be a hero,” Sheriff Will Kane stoically resolved,” If you think I like this, you’re crazy…. I’ve got to, that’s the whole thing.” Thus, Gary Cooper’s character set out for a gunfight, facing down outlaws in the classic 1952 western High Noon. -
Just as two African American women – Roberta Slayton and Helen Carter – integrated Southeast Missouri’s student body in 1954, two black men broke the sports color barrier. These pioneering student athletes – Ronald Staten and Curtis Williams - became the first African Americans to play intercollegiate sports for our university.
