A hundred years ago in a dusty courtyard in Amritsar, India, a horrific massacre took place when British Raj troops opened fire on thousands of unarmed men, women, and children attending a peaceful demonstration. 1650 rounds of ammunition were expended, most hit their targets. As many as a thousand died. Today, outside of Jallianwala Bagh, as its called, there's a statue of a man, with a defiant expression, holding a clod of earth in his outstretched hand.

Over the years, the U.S. Uniformed Public Health Service has contributed to containing pandemics in Africa, preventing disease outbreaks after natural disasters,  and helping move forward public health initiatives like the Clean Air Act or the Safe Drinking Water Act, but it also has been criticized for its role in the notorious Tuskegee syphillis study which followed African-Americans with the disease for decades, even after penicillin was known to cure the illness. Today, there are proposals to slash the funding for this organization, or eliminate it altogether. Our guest is Dr.

Today we welcome Sterlin Harjo back to StudioTulsa. The celebrated locally-based filmmaker has a new movie, which he tells us about. It's a documentary short called "Terlton," and it'll have its world premiere this coming Saturday, the 13th, as part of the 2019 Circle Cinema Film Festival. "Terlton" takes us back to the summer of 1985, when a small town in Oklahoma -- incredibly, and so sadly -- lost a full one-fourth of its population when an explosion happened at a local fireworks factory.

On this edition of StudioTulsa, we learn all about the vitally important book/author/reading series known as Book Smart Tulsa, which was started ten years ago (pretty much single-handedly) by our guest, Jeff Martin. He worked for years as a local bookseller and is now the Communications Manager at Philbrook Museum of Art; he's also the co-creator of our popular Museum Confidential podcast here at Public Radio Tulsa.