Before the Civil War, Missouri was territory where it was legal to own slaves. People could be bought and owned and sold. Amidst the horrors of enslavement, blacks and their allies in the region found ways to fight against the system that kept them in bondage. Harriet Scott’s story is part of the National Park Service’s Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. She is buried in St. Louis’ Greenwood Cemetery. Credit: Greenwood Cemetery Preservation Association On this episode of Mo’ Curious, we meet a group of historians and archivists who are researching the backstories of formerly enslaved pe ..read more

Lucille H. Douglass (at left) and Oralee McKinzy at the Parkville, Missouri Public Library in March 2023 Missouri history happened here. Right here. On this same ground on which we live today. That includes the history of slavery and racial segregation. When we tell the story of our state’s history, often the narrative is that of white and male Missourians. The family and personal stories of women and people of color are too often neglected when the narrative is told about the making of Missouri. In this episode of Mo’ Curious meet two Kansas City women who are teaching themselves and others a ..read more

Back in 1972, radio station KOPN was founded to serve the Columbia, Missouri area. The station was licensed for broadcast early the next year and now – over 50 years later – the community radio station that wasn’t expected to survive is still going strong. In 2022, the KOPN Oral History Project captured memories from the station’s founders, former staff and long-time programmers. This podcast episode draws from those oral histories to tell a history of the station. An history about the life and times of Columbia, Missouri’s community radio station, KOPN. Radio station KOPN is real and can be s ..read more

Over 60,000 Bosnian refugees and their children live in St. Louis area. They have a significant influence on the region’s economy, religious life and culture. In this episode of the Mo’ Curious podcast we meet four Bosnians making sense of their past and mapping out their future as members of two cultures: Bosnian and American. Here is the story of some of the Bosnians who now call St. Louis, Missouri home. Music in this episode was from the Bosnian-St. Louis band, Albosy. Here’s a fuller dose of the band: More episodes of the podcast are available at MoCurious.com. Thanks for listening and s ..read more

In this episode, we listen to the oral histories of Margot McMillen. We hear from a river boat captain, a train engineer and an independent woman. These and several dozen other Missourians were the subjects of Margot’s late 1970s oral history recordings. At that time, Margot was a young mother of two, a graduate student in English and a budding author. She was also was a listener. When the Union Electric utility started buying land from farmers in Southern Callaway County for a nuclear power plant, Margot jumped into action. With her recording kit and an abundance of curiosity, she set out to ..read more

There aren’t many folks alive today who remember what went down in the Bootheel in the winter of 1939. There are remaining, however, longtime residents who know about the sharecroppers’ strike, what it meant then and what it means now. Click here to listen to part 2 of a two-part episode about Missouri’s 1939 sharecroppers’ strike. Mo’ Curious is a podcast about the past, present and future of our 24th state. Special thanks to Matt Schacht and Vidwest Studios for their support ..read more

Back in 1939, the world was a different place. For one thing, there were a lot more people involved in farming. In Missouri’s Bootheel region, this meant bodies were needed to grow cotton. Under the sharecropper model, those Missourians who grew cotton had no guarantees of a wage. They could be evicted anytime from the land on which they lived and worked. In this episode of Mo’ Curious, we learn about the 1939 sharecroppers strike in Mississippi County, Missouri. It was on January 1 of that Depression year that Bootheel tenant farmers, or sharecroppers, participated in a protest. They camped o ..read more

Madelyn Paine remembers getting weighed at the Dalton elevator. Diane Pippens feels her light skin helped her pass for white or Mexican when she integrated her town’s high school. William Payne recalls the town’s annual reunion where he met his future wife. It was at Dalton, Missouri’s annual reunion in 2021 that I did my first interview for this episode of the Mo’ Curious Podcast. Throughout that summer and ending on Labor Day of the same year, my collaborator Jennifer Thornburg and I conducted six oral histories with alumni from the former Dalton Vocational School in Chariton County. Here’s ..read more

Whereas much of modern, industrial, late stage capitalism is based around competition for scarce material resources, there are a few among us who choose to work together to achieve a standard of living that’s good enough. In an intentional community, or commune, people organize themselves around cooperative activities. In the first part of this two-part episode, we explored what 19th and 20th century Missouri utopias were like. In this episode, we head to Northeast Missouri’s Scotland County to meet some contemporary communards and hear what draws them to the land in search of a more intention ..read more

Almost as long as there has been a Missouri, there have been idealists in our midst. In 1844, “Doctor” Wilhelm Keil and his followers established the German Communal Society of Bethel in Northeast Missouri. They were followed by an Icarian outpost in 1858 near St. Louis. In this episode of Mo’ Curious, you’ll learn about these settlements, what inspired them and how the lineage of radical rural cooperation continues into the 21st century. This is the first part of a two-part episode on utopias and communes in Missouri. Here is part II. This episode of Mo’ Curious is generously sponsored by Mi ..read more