The American Revolution on the Frontier

FAIN: MP-50038-07

Missouri Historical Society (St. Louis, MO 63177-5460)
Carolyn Gilman (Project Director: September 2006 to November 2009)

Planning for a traveling exhibition, publications, and a website examining the American Revolution as experienced in the trans-Appalachian U.S. and the changing values that came with it.

The American Revolution is a foundational event that contributes to our sense of who we are as a nation. While most Americans view the War as confined to the eastern seaboard, there was another Revolution that is far less familiar--the western war fought between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. Yet the issues that characterized the Revolution in the West proved no less crucial in establishing American identity, defining the future of this land, and determining who had a right to it. To address this neglected episode in American history, the Missouri Historical Society is planning a multi-component project centered upon the first major traveling exhibition ever mounted on the western Revolution. The 6,000 square-foot exhibition, which will open in St. Louis some time after 2010, will reflect the complexity and ambiguity of a multi-sided cultural conflict that gave the West a different character from the East and shaped the identity of the new nation.