Airing this Month

The Lost Patrol of Guadalcanal (September 6 - 12)

On the 12 th of August 1942, Lt. Col. Frank Goettge and 24 Marines under his command landed in the dark on the wrong beach on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands and came under withering fire from Japanese soldiers, killing Goettge and 21 of his men.

Sixty-six years later, Cliff and Donna Boyd (Radford University) and Rhett Herman (Radford University) led a mission to use state of the art techniques to search for the missing in action Americans.

Also featured: Don Cunningham (Radford University) had a job that took him to Japan where he became fascinated with the culture of the Japanese samurais. He recently published Samurai Weapons: Tools of a Warrior, detailing the daily lives of the samurai and the weapons that made up the storied warriors’ arsenal.

WGR News Feature: Sixty-six years ago, an ill-fated Marine patrol was gunned down during an intense WWII battle on the island of Guadalcanal.  Their bodies were never found, despite many search efforts.  This past summer, a Virginia forensics team went looking for their remains.  Nancy King, with the radio program "With Good Reason," picks up the story. Listen to the two and a half minute feature.

You Sound Like You're Not From Around Here... (September 13 – 19)

Within seconds of hearing someone speak, we make judgments about that person and background, just based on their accent. Linguistics professor Steven Weinberger ( George Mason University) explains how and when we develop accents and how they affect our identity. Also: Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth century writings may seem impenetrable, with strange pronunciation and incomprehensible phrases . But English professor Alan Baragona (Virginia Military Institute) says the best way to approach Chaucer is to read it out loud and listen to the musicality of the words.

Web Extras:

Empire Magazine’s ten worst movie accents, including Charlton Heston as a Mexican

GMU’s Speech Accent Archive hosts hundreds of different accents of English speech

Alan Baragona's Chaucer website

Massive Resistance in Virginia (September 20 - 26)

This summer, a statue honoring leaders of Virginia’s civil rights movement was dedicated on Capitol Square grounds in Richmond. One of the panels features Oliver W. Hill, an attorney who argued the landmark case of Brown vs. the Board of Education before the Supreme Court. Oliver Hill, Jr. (Virginia State University) shares memories of the change his father effected in Virginia over decades.

Also: Charles Ford (Norfolk State University) is studying the papers of some moderate civic leaders in Norfolk who publicly opposed Massive Resistance while privately sharing many of the goals of the segregationists. And: James Sweeney (Old Dominion University) shares revealing insights from the diary of an eminent Richmond moderate of the era, David J. Mays.

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Torture and The Lexington Principles (September 27 - October 3)

After September 11, 2001 President Bush and his administration were under tremendous pressure to try to prevent another devastating attack, which they believed was imminent. This led to the secret authorization of interrogation methods that many have called torture. Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side, and Dahlia Lithwick, a senior editor at Slate, discuss how techniques like water-boarding and humiliation became a part of America’s policy towards detainees. Also, a group of Washington and Lee alumni and professors is trying to reshape America’s policy towards detainee treatment. David Jordan and Brooke Lewis have gathered a team of legal scholars and interrogation experts to draft “The Lexington Principles,” designed to prevent torture and clarify how America should gather information from prisoners.

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