The Past in Pieces: Tales of the Missouri-Kansas Border War

The Past in Pieces: Tales from the Missouri-Kansas Border War is a new narrative history podcast series created by students at the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri. Each fifteen-minute episode explores an aspect of the nineteenth-century struggle over slavery in the Kansas-Missouri borderlands, where the Civil War began. Listeners encounter Jayhawkers, Bushwhackers, and ordinary families; moments of political crisis and personal tragedy; and stories of the harrowing violence that fell most heavily on civilians. The series also traces the first African American troops in combat and how their experiences reshaped the meaning of freedom. The pieces of each episode form a larger picture, like a puzzle coming together to reveal the full story of an era of American history that is more relevant than ever as we drift toward political violence in our own era today.