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Portal:Missouri

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Missouri (see pronunciation) is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States. Ranking 21st in land area, it borders Iowa to the north, Illinois, Kentucky and Tennessee to the east, Arkansas to the south and Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska to the west. In the south are the Ozarks, a forested highland, providing timber, minerals, and recreation. At 1.5 billion years old, the St. Francois Mountains are among the oldest in the world. The Missouri River, after which the state is named, flows through the center and into the Mississippi River, which makes up the eastern border. With over six million residents, it is the 19th-most populous state of the country. The largest urban areas are St. Louis, Kansas City, Springfield, and Columbia. The capital is Jefferson City.

Humans have inhabited present-day Missouri for at least 12,000 years. The Mississippian culture, which emerged in the ninth century, built cities with pyramidal and other ceremonial mounds before declining in the 14th century. The Indigenous Osage and Missouria nations inhabited the area when European people arrived in the 17th century. The French incorporated the territory into Louisiana, founding Ste. Genevieve in 1735 and St. Louis in 1764. After a brief period of Spanish rule, the United States acquired Missouri as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Americans from the Upland South rushed into the new Missouri Territory, taking advantage of its productive agricultural plains; Missouri played a central role in the westward expansion of the United States. Missouri was admitted as a slave state as part of the Missouri Compromise of 1820. As a border state, Missouri's role in the American Civil War was complex, and it was subject to rival governments, raids, and guerilla warfare. After the war, both Greater St. Louis and the Kansas City metropolitan area became large centers of industrialization and business.

Today the state is divided into 114 counties and the independent city of St. Louis. Missouri has been called the "Mother of the West", the "Cave State", and the "Show Me State". Its culture blends elements of the Midwestern and Southern United States. It is the birthplace of the musical genres ragtime, Kansas City jazz and St. Louis blues. The well-known Kansas City-style barbecue, and the lesser-known St. Louis-style barbecue, can be found across the state and beyond. (Full article...)

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Lloyd Lionel Gaines (born 1911 – disappeared March 19, 1939) was the plaintiff in Gaines v. Canada (1938), one of the most important early court cases in the 20th-century U.S. civil rights movement. After being denied admission to the University of Missouri School of Law because he was African American, and refusing the university's offer to pay for him to attend a neighboring state's law school that had no racial restriction, Gaines filed suit. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled in his favor, holding that the separate but equal doctrine required that Missouri either admit him or set up a separate law school for black students.

The Missouri General Assembly chose the latter option. It authorized conversion of a former cosmetology school in St. Louis to establish the Lincoln University School of Law, to which other, mostly black, students were admitted. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which had supported Gaines's suit, planned to file another one challenging the adequacy of the new law school. While waiting for classes to begin, Gaines traveled between St. Louis, Kansas City and Chicago looking for work. He worked odd jobs and gave speeches before local NAACP chapters. One night in Chicago he left the fraternity house where he was staying and never returned. He was never seen again by anyone who knew or recognized him. (Full article...)

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Maison Bequette-Ribault,
c. 1805; privately owned

Ste. Genevieve (French: Sainte-Geneviève [sɛ̃t ʒənvjɛv]) is a city in Ste. Genevieve Township and is the county seat of Ste. Genevieve County, Missouri, United States. The population was 4,999 at the 2020 census. Founded in 1735 by French Canadian colonists and settlers from east of the river, it was the first organized European settlement west of the Mississippi River in present-day Missouri. Today, it is home to Ste. Genevieve National Historical Park, the 422nd unit of the National Park Service. (Full article...)

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