Episode 11: ”Wide-Open Town” – Diane Mutti Burke & Jason Roe (Going to Kansas City, Part 4)

With this year's Missouri Conference on History coming up in March, many scholars will soon be going to Kansas City. To help prepare for the conference, the Our Missouri Podcast invites listeners to explore the City of Fountains from the confluence of two mighty rivers near the downtown skyline to the Plaza, the Paseo, and the intersection of 18th and Vine. This five-part series entitled "Going to Kansas City" focuses on several projects and institutions that document and define Kansas City's history and identity. This episode features Diane Mutti Burke and Jason Roe talking about the recently edited collection, Wide-Open Town: Kansas City in the Pendergast Era. This new book is a collaborative era by several scholars to research and document Kansas City's diverse population and institutions during the first half of the 20th Century.

About the Guest: Diane Mutti Burke is a professor of history and director of the Center for Midwestern Studies at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She holds a Ph.D. in History from Emory University. Her first book, On Slavery’s Border: Missouri’s Small-Slaveholding Households, 1815-1865, won the Missouri Conference on History Book Award in 2010. In addition to her award-winning book, she has also co-edited three anthologies on the Missouri/Kansas border region, including Kansas City, America’s Crossroads, co-edited with John Herron; Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri: The Long Civil War on the Border, co-edited with Jonathan Earle; and Wide Open Town: Kansas City during the Pendergast Era, co-edited with John Herron and Jason Roe.

Jason Roe is the digital history specialist for the Kansas City Public Library. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Kansas. He is also the recipient of several awards for his digital history projects through the Kansas City Public Library, including "The Pendergast Years" and "Civil War on the Western Border" which won the Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History from the American Historical Association and George Mason University.