"The First Morning of Their Freedom" Lecture

10/18/2018 | Bruce R. Watkins Cultural Heritage Center | Kansas City, MO

Missouri State Parks is proud to announce a public lecture given by Diane Mutti-Burke, Ph.D., entitled “The First Morning of Their Freedom: Black Missourian’s Role in Ending Slavery, Ensuring Union Victory and Redefining US Citizenship.”

Mutti-Burke is a professor and chair of the history department and director of the Center for Midwestern Studies at the University of Missouri – Kansas City. Her award-winning first book “On Slavery’s Border: Missouri’s Small-Slaveholding Households, 1815-1865” (University of Georgia Press, 2010) is a bottom-up examination of how slavery and slaveholding were influenced by both geography and the small scale of slavery in Missouri. In addition, she also co-edited collections of scholarly articles on the Missouri-Kansas Border Wars called “Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri: The Long Civil War on the Border” (University Press of Kansas, 2013) and the history of Kansas City during the 1920s and 30s called “Wide-Open Town: Kansas City during the Pendergast Era” (University Press of Kansas, 2018). She is also working on a new book about refugee populations during the Civil War. Mutti-Burke is dedicated to bringing the Civil War-era history of this region to public audiences and is the director of a National Endowment for the Humanities K-12 teacher workshop on the Missouri/Kansas Border Wars.  In May 2015, she was named the recipient of the Distinguished Literary Achievement Award from the Missouri Humanities Council for her scholarship on the history and culture of Missouri.

This lecture will be held at the Bruce R. Watkins Cultural Heritage Center at 3700 Blue Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., Kansas City, Missouri. There will be a pre-reception at 6:30 p.m., the lecture will begin promptly at 7 p.m., followed by a brief and informal question and answer session.

For more information about the event, please contact Cecelia Brueggemann at Cecelia.brueggemann@dnr.mo.gov or 816-372-8723.

Lecture time: 7 p.m.