As part of its mission to generate interest and appreciation for the rich cultural heritage of the state and its people, the Society hosts a wide range of engaging and educational events for scholars and community members of all ages.
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Join us for the National History Day in Missouri state contest, administered by The State Historical Society of Missouri. The contest will take place in-person at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Sign up to be a judge and support Missouri students! Top-ranking state projects will go on to compete in the national contest run by the NHD office in College Park, Maryland.
Sign up to be a judge: https://www.nhdmo.org/judges.html
As executive producer of Ozark Jubilee, Si Siman had to sell country music to ABC television executives who viewed the Ozarks as a backwoods region and repeatedly tried to change or cancel the show because of its "hillbillyisms." Dr. Kitty Ledbetter, co-author of Broadcasting the Ozarks: Si Siman and Country Music at the Crossroads, will look inside Siman's efforts to shape the Ozark Jubilee to their demands and his role in introducing country music and the Ozarks to viewers across America. Books will be available for purchase and signing.
John Robinson, a former Missouri director of tourism, puts a different spin on the traditional road trip. Over 13 years, he drove every mile of every road on the Missouri state highway map. With an irreverent sense of humor--Robinson compares his unconventional journey to mowing a 68,000-square-mile lawn—he and his car (his only constant companion on this odyssey) discover the real America beyond the interstate. Real people. Obscure places. Forgotten facts.
You're invited to the 14th annual For the People Pow Wow on Memorial Day weekend, May 25 and 26, in Jefferson City. Enjoy food, dance, art, crafts and singing at this FREE event open to the public. Native American dancing begins at noon on Saturday, May 25 through the evening. On Sunday, the dancing will happen noon to 5 p.m. Meet dancers from Oklahoma and Missouri, including Master of Ceremonies William Branson of Columbia.
Join Cape Girardeau Research Center Coordinator Bill Eddleman for the next installment in his genealogy series: “Crossing the Pond: Tracing Ancestors in Immigration and Naturalization Records.” Most family historians in the U. S. have ancestors who migrated from other continents. Depending on the time period of immigration and port of arrival, it can be difficult to find these ancestors and tell their immigration story. This session will summarize surviving immigration records from different time periods and where to find them.
The history of the Ozarks - its stories, culture and characters - has long been preserved through the efforts of women in media, whether in writing, radio or filmmaking, Joy Robertson, former news anchor and lifestyle host, will speak with Stella Blackmon, filmmaker, producer and editor; Greta Cross, trending topics reporter at the Springfield News-Leader; Michele Skalicky, news director at KSMU Radio; and Sha'Diya tomlin, KOLR/KRBK reporter, about their work telling the region's stories, navigating the media industry, and approaching news reporting and storytelling in an ever-changing land
To mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion of Europe during World War II, we’ll look at how a small Missouri railroad town took on the war. The story and its pictures come from the weekly Pleasant Hill Times and from letters it published from men and women serving at home and abroad. In the postwar years, a young Bill Cloud, often tagged along when his father, Tilghman Cloud, who took pictures for the family-owned newspaper.
SHSMO has a selection of on demand programs that are freely available to worldwide audiences.
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History books tend to include Missouri’s Indigenous population only during periods when they were a threat to the state’s white settlement. These histories overlook the fact that Native people have lived here for at least twelve thousand years and continue to call Missouri home today.
Dr. Joan Stack, curator of art collections at the State Historical Society of Missouri, gives a talk and shares artwork of Black artists in Missouri. Dr. Stack focuses on ten artists of the 20th and 21st centuries with an emphasis on artists whose artwork is in the collection of the State Historical Society of Missouri.
The Orphan Train Movement sent an estimated quarter million children from New York City to the Midwest and the South from 1854 to 1929, with up to 50,000 of them coming to Missouri. One of those children was a five-year-old boy named Joseph Aner, who was placed with the Markway family just outside Jefferson City. As Joseph grew up, he wondered who his mother was, and how she could have left him at an orphanage.
More than a century later, Joseph’s grandchildren had the same questions.
SHSMO executive director Gary Kremer connects the past to the present in his latest book as he ponders why history played out as it did over the course of two centuries since Missouri’s admittance to the Union.
For centuries, the violin has been both a “people’s instrument” as well as a “palace” instrument that spans the globe. Whether called “violin” or “fiddle” (they are the same, just with differing customs of learning and performance), it continues to be enjoyed across many different traditions and communities.
