ISU's Philip Homan is Guest on New Horizons Radio Show May 15

Philip A. Homan, associate professor at Idaho State University’s Eli M. Oboler Library and an Idaho Humanities Council 2008 Research Fellow,

will discuss his research on Kittie Wilkins, the Horse Queen of Idaho, on Friday, May 15, on the Boise State Radio program New Horizons with Bob Kustra.

The show will air on NPR News 91, 91.5 FM, in Boise, at 5:30 p.m., and will be rebroadcast Sunday, May 17, at 11 a.m.  

The program can be heard in Pocatello online at http://radio.boisestate.edu/NewHorizons, and an MP3 file of the interview will be available May 18 on the station’s Web site.

Kittie Wilkins, who lived from 1857 to 1936, sold horses by the carloads in the livestock markets of the Midwest. Newspapers in cities along the Union Pacific announced her arrival at the stockyards with headlines such as “The Only One of Her Kind,” “Is Consistent Womanhood,” and “She Is a New Type,” and papers throughout America spread the word about the Idaho girl who was making a fortune selling horses. Interviews in the Denver, Sioux City, Omaha, Kansas City, St. Louis, New Orleans, and Chicago newspapers were re-run in papers across the country, such as the Boston Advertiser, New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore American, Washington Post, and Atlanta Constitution. Most of the over 550 newspaper articles Homan has identified so far about Wilkins, her family, and her friends and associates are news reports, feature stories, and interviews from newspapers in 37 of the lower 48 states, as well as the District of Columbia, plus Canada, Great Britain, and New Zealand. In fact, Wilkins made the largest horse sale ever.

Homan’s research is supported by a grant from the Idaho Humanities Council, the state-based affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is writing the first biography of Wilkins.

For more information, contact Homan at 208-282-3047 or email at  homaphil@isu.edu.