The Stanford Digest EP 08 - Seeing History Through Regional Nonfiction
Channel: SyncLab Media
Date: 2020-10-28

Richard Stanford takes you on a journey through Mississippi, Arkansas and Texas during very interesting times with colorful characters in this episode of The Stanford Digest.

Part history and part travelogue, The Deepest South of All by Richard Grant offers a gripping portrait of a complex American place, as it struggles to break free from the past and confront the legacy of slavery.

Gangsters, gamblers, and gamines: all once flocked to America’s forgotten capital of vice, a place where small-town hustlers and bigtime high-rollers could make their fortunes, and hide from the law. The Vapors by native David Hill is the extraordinary story of three individuals―spanning the golden decades of Hot Springs, from the 1930s through the 1960s―and the lavish casino whose spectacular rise and fall would bring them together before blowing them apart.

The Last Sheriff in Texas by James P. McCollom is a riveting narrative about the postwar American landscape, an era grappling with the same issues we continue to face today. Debate over excessive force in law enforcement, Anglo-Mexican relations, gun control, the influence of the media, urban-rural conflict, the power of the oil industry, mistrust of politicians and the political process—all have surprising historical precedence in the story of Vail Ennis and Johnny Barnhart.