This unique book combines state-specific facts and 30 fun-to-do hands-on projects. The History Project Book includes creating a cartoon panel to describe how your state name may have come about, creating a fort replica, making a state history museum, dressing up as a famous explorer and recreating the main discovery, and more! Kids will have a blast and build essential knowledge skills including research, reading, writing, science and math. Great for students in K-8 grades and for displaying in the classroom, library or home.

Women in Missouri History is an exceptional collection of essays surveying the history of women in the state of Missouri from the period of colonial settlement through the mid-twentieth century. The women featured in these essays come from various ethnic, economic, and racial groups, from both urban and rural areas, and from all over the state. The authors effectively tell these women’s stories through biographies and through techniques of social history, allowing the reader to learn not only about the women’s lives individually, but also about how groups of “ordinary” women shaped the history of the state. The essays in this collection address questions that are at the center of current developments in the field of women’s history but are written in a manner that makes them accessible to general readers. Providing an excellent general overview of the history of women in Missouri, this collection makes a valuable contribution to a better understanding of the state’s past.

Join Meriwether Lewis and William Clark's Corps of Discovery as they navigate the muddy Missouri River and begin a great adventure set against the background of the vast North American continent. Lewis and Clark for Kids takes children from President Jefferson's vision of an exploratory mission across a continent full of unique plants and animals through their dangerous and challenging journey into the unknown to the expedition's triumphant return to the frontier town of St. Louis. Twenty-one activities bring to life the Native American tribes they encountered, the plants and animals they discovered, and the camping and navigating techniques they used. A glossary of terms and listings of Lewis and Clark sites, museums, and related Web sites round out this comprehensive activity book.

Conceived of as a way to commemorate Missouri’s bicentennial of statehood, this unique work presents the perspective of Gary Kremer, one of the Show-Me State’s foremost historians, as he ponders why history played out as it did over the course of the two centuries since Missouri’s admittance to the Union. In the writing of what is much more than a survey history, Kremer, himself a fifth-generation Missourian, infuses the narrative with his vast knowledge and personal experiences, even as he considers what being a Missourian has meant—across the many years and to this day—to all of the state’s people, and how the forces of history—time, place, race, gender, religion, and class—shaped people and determined their opportunities and choices, in turn creating collective experiences that draw upon the past in an attempt to make sense of the present and plan for the future. Key elements of the book include the centrality of race to the Missouri experience—from the time Missourians began to seek statehood in 1817 all the way up to the Black Lives Matter movement of the 21st century—as well as ongoing tensions created by the urban-rural divide and struggle to define the proper role of government in society.

The Mormon presence in nineteenth-century Missouri was uneasy at best and at times flared into violence fed by misunderstanding and suspicion. By the end of 1838, blood was shed, and Governor Lilburn Boggs ordered that Mormons were to be “exterminated or driven from the state.” The Missouri persecutions greatly shaped Mormon faith and culture; this book reexamines Mormon-Missourian history within the sociocultural context of its time. The contributors to this volume unearth the challenges and assumptions on both sides of the conflict, as well as the cultural baggage that dictated how their actions and responses played on each other. Shortly after Joseph Smith proclaimed Jackson County the site of the “New Jerusalem,” Mormon settlers began moving to western Missouri, and by 1833 they made up a third of the county’s population. Mormons and Missourians did not mix well. The new settlers were relocated to Caldwell County, but tensions still escalated, leading to the three-month “Mormon War” in 1838—capped by the Haun’s Mill Massacre, now a seminal event in Mormon history. These nine essays explain why Missouri had an important place in the theology of 1830s Mormonism and was envisioned as the site of a grand temple. The essays also look at interpretations of the massacre, the response of Columbia’s more moderate citizens to imprisoned church leaders (suggesting that the conflict could have been avoided if Smith had instead chosen Columbia as his new Zion), and Mormon migration through the state over the thirty years following their expulsion. Although few Missourians today are aware of this history, many Mormons continue to be suspicious of the state despite the eventual rescinding of Governor Boggs’s order. By depicting the Missouri-Mormon conflict as the result of a particularly volatile blend of cultural and social causes, this book takes a step toward understanding the motivations behind the conflict and sheds new light on the state of religious tolerance in frontier America.