Crossroads of Conflict: Contested Visions of Freedom and the Missouri-Kansas Border Wars

FAIN: BH-250930-16

University of Missouri, Kansas City (Kansas City, MO 64110-2235)
Diane Louise Mutti Burke (Project Director: February 2016 to December 2019)

Two one-week workshops for seventy-two schoolteachers on the “border wars” in Kansas and Missouri during the Civil War era.

Crossroads of Conflict: Contested Visions of Freedom and the Missouri-Kansas Border War is a Landmarks of American History Workshop for Teachers that explores historic homes and public buildings, landscapes and archival collections in light of recent research to understand the clash of cultures and differing definitions of “freedom” that played out on the Missouri-Kansas border. Workshop participants will consider the forces and events that led to the abandonment of the understandings reached in the Missouri Compromise, the rejection of popular sovereignty in the Kansas Territory and the establishment of the shadow “Free State” government. They will examine the nature and intensity of the struggles between the Kansas Jayhawkers and Missouri Bushwhackers and the general mayhem these vicious disputes engendered. Workshop faculty includes some of the most respected scholars on the Civil War on the Western Border.