Workshop - Crossroads of Conflict: Contested Visions of Freedom & The Missouri-Kansas Border Wars 2017, USA

Publish Date: Feb 15, 2017

Deadline: Mar 31, 2017

Crossroads of Conflict: Contested Visions of Freedom and the Missouri-Kansas Border War is a Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshop for Teachers.

It explores historic homes and public buildings, landscapes, and archival collections in light of recent scholarship in order to better understand the clash of cultures and differing definitions of “freedom” that played out on the Missouri-Kansas border. Workshop participants will consider the forces and events that led to the abandonment of the understandings reached in the Missouri Compromise, the challenge to popular sovereignty in the Kansas Territory, and the establishment of the shadow “Free State” government. They will examine the nature and intensity of the struggles between the Kansas Jayhawkers and Missouri Bushwhackers and the general mayhem these vicious disputes engendered along the Missouri-Kansas border during the fight over the status of Kansas, as well as during the violent years of the Civil War.

The Crossroads of Conflict workshop will provide K-12 teachers with tools to devise fresh techniques for using historical settings, architecture, material culture, art and drama, along with historical documents and records to enable students to engage with the past and gain a better understanding of the forces that shaped and continue to influence national and local history.

Historical Themes

The experiences of Missouri and Kansas residents during the era of the Border Wars is a window on the issues and circumstances that shattered the Union during the Civil War. It was on the Missouri-Kansas border that Americans first grappled with the problem of liberty and slavery face to face – sometimes even shedding blood in the interest of their cause. An exploration of this most uncivil of wars also provides insight into the ways in which societies can be fragmented by ideology and ultimately rebuilt upon different lines. Only when Missourians and Kansans embraced a common vision for America – one based on shared agricultural practices, ideas about economic development, and racial inequality – did Americans on both two sides of the border reconcile.
 
Beginning in the years following the War of 1812, settlers from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia flooded into the bottomlands of the Missouri River bringing with them the cultural values of the Upper South. Many also brought their slaves. When the nation’s leaders argued over the future of Missouri slavery in 1820, they did not consult actual Missourians who would have soundly supported their peculiar institution. In 1836, the Americans bought the Platte Purchase from the Sac and Fox tribes and thus forced Native Americans westward off the fertile soil of the Missouri River Valley. Over time the population of the state became increasingly more diverse as German and Irish immigrants and settlers from northern states moved there. Many of the new arrivals had a different vision for Missouri, encouraging early industrial development in the region and promoting new railroad ties to the Northeast and Upper Midwest.
 
As the nation grew, thousands of people passed through Missouri on the way west on the Santa Fe, California, and Oregon Trails. The Missouri-Kansas border became a bustling crossroads where merchandise, cultures, and beliefs mixed and changed to take on a character of their own. But when the United States Congress opened up settlement across the state line in Kansas in 1854, this cultural and political diversity took on a new resonance. Americans held different visions for the future of the new Kansas Territory depending on their beliefs about “liberty” and “freedom.” Under the concept of popular sovereignty, settlers holding conflicting ideas flocked into the territory: some traveling from nearby Missouri and others from as far away as New England. 
 
Bitter feuding turned into open hostilities on the Missouri-Kansas border well before the firing on Fort Sumter. Violence erupted in Kansas as free soil and pro-slavery settlers vied to stake land claims and elect a new territorial government. The eyes of the nation watched as the citizens of Kansas and Missouri attempted to resolve the question of the extension of slavery that had so long plagued the nation. Eventually, even the halls of Congress were not immune to the forces unleashed on the border.
 
Free soil settlers eventually won the battle and Kansas joined the Union as a free state in 1861, but the bitter memories of the violent conflict simmering beneath the surface erupted in an even more virulent form during the Civil War. It was now Missouri’s turn to bleed as the growing internal divisions existing before the war and the presence of hostile forces on the western border turned the state into the scene of vicious guerrilla warfare. Missouri civilians – both enslaved and free – were caught in the crossfire as Union and Confederate troops fought for control of the state and Bushwhackers and Jayhawkers ravaged the countryside.

Keynote Scholars

Nicole Etcheson is Alexander M. Bracken Professor of History at Ball State University. Etcheson is a scholar of 19th Century America and the Civil War, whose book, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Period, is the definitive work on the clash of values that gave rise to the Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas border. Her most recent book, A Generation at War: The Civil War Era in a Northern Community, won the Organization of American Historians/Indiana Historical Society “Best Book on the Civil War” in 2012.

Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel is the Mary Frances Barnard Professor in 19th Century American History at the University of Tulsa. Her scholarly interests focus on issues of race, class, and gender. Her first book, Bleeding Borders: Race, Gender, and Violence in Pre-Civil War Kansas, analyzes the ways in which Native Americans, African Americans and women shaped the conflicts of the Border Wars. Her most recent work, Frontier Feminist, is a biography of Clarina Nichols, a prominent activist for women's rights in 19th Century Kansas. She published a biography of Harriett Tubman in 2015.

Christopher Phillips is Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati, where he teaches Civil War history. He is the author of a number of books about the Civil War era history of Missouri. His most recent book, The Rivers Ran Backward:The Civil War in the Middle Border and the Making of American Regionalism, discusses the ways in which citizens living in Midwestern border states constructed a variety of cultural responses to the challenges posed by the Civil War.

Jeremy Neely, Missouri State University, received the University of Missouri Distinguished Dissertation award in 2005. His first book, The Border between Them: Violence and Reconciliation on the Kansas-Missouri Line, is one of the only books to explore the Border Wars conflict from both sides of the state line.

Ann Raab, University of Missouri – Kansas City, received her PhD in archeology from the University of Kansas. Her research focuses on the material impact of the violence and destruction along the Missouri-Kansas border during the years of Bleeding Kansas and the Civil War. She has excavated a farmhouse and store that were burned during the war, as well as the site of the Battle of Island Mound.

Ethan Rafuse is Professor of Military History at the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. He also has taught at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Rafuse has authored numerous books and articles about Civil War battles and commanders. He has deep experience in interpreting Civil War battlefields and has authored a number of battlefield guides.

Academic Director: Diane Mutti Burke is an Associate Professor and chair of the History Department at the University of Missouri – Kansas City and the Director of the UMKC Center for Midwestern Studies.  She is the author of On Slavery’s Border: Missouri’s Small-Slaveholding Household, 1820-1865, and the co-editor, along with Jonathan Earle, of Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri: The Long Civil War on the Border. In addition, she is editing and annotating a 19th Century Missouri woman’s diary entitled A House of Her Own: The Diary of a Small-Slaveholding Woman and has begun work on a book about refugee populations during the American Civil War.  She regularly shares her scholarship with public audiences, frequently consults with cultural organization on their regional history related public programming, and serves on a number of boards of local history organizations.

Workshop Faculty

Christopher Cantwell is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.  He is a scholar of American religious history and the director of the UMKC History Department’s Public History program. His research focuses on the history of evangelical Christians in the American Midwest.

Workshop Coordinator: Mary Ann Wynkoop is the former director of the American Studies Program at the University of Missouri–Kansas City.

Master Teacher: Dacia Rzchowski is a 30-year veteran teacher and a distinguished member of UMKC's High School College Partnership faculty. She has worked with the Crossroads teachers four times in the past and has attended numerous Landmarks workshops as an NEH scholar. 

Application Information and Instructions

Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshops provide K-12 educators with the opportunity to engage in intensive study and discussion of important topics and issues in American history and culture, while providing them with direct experiences in the interpretation of significant historical and cultural sites and the use of archival and other primary evidence.

Prior to completing an application to a specific workshop, please review the project website and consider carefully what is expected in terms of residence and attendance, reading and writing requirements, and general participation in the work of the project.

NEH Landmarks workshops involve teachers in collaboration with core faculty and visiting scholars to study the best available scholarship on a specific landmark or cluster of landmarks. Workshops, offered twice in one summer, accommodate 36 teachers in each one-week session. Participants benefit by gaining a sense of the importance of historical and cultural places, by making connections between the workshop content and what they teach, and by developing individual teaching and/or research materials.

Please Note: An individual may apply to up to two NEH summer projects (NEH Landmarks Workshops, NEH Summer Seminars, or NEH Summer Institutes), but may participate in only one.

Selection Criteria

A selection committee (consisting in most cases of the project director, one of the project scholars, and a veteran teacher) will read and evaluate all properly completed applications.

Special consideration is given to the likelihood that an applicant will benefit professionally and personally from the workshop experience. It is important, therefore, to address each of the following factors in the application essay:

1) your professional background;
2) your interest in the subject of the workshop;
3) your special perspectives, skills, or experiences that would contribute to the workshop; and
4) how the experience would enhance your teaching or school service.

While recent participants are eligible to apply, selection committees are charged to give first consideration to applicants who have not participated in an NEH-supported seminar, institute or workshop within the last three years (2014, 2015, 2016). Additionally, preference is given to applicants who would significantly contribute to the diversity of the workshop.

Stipend, Tenure and Conditions of Award

Teachers selected to participate as NEH Summer Scholars will receive a stipend at the end of the workshop session: $600 for commuting participants who incur no housing costs; $1,200 for residential participants who incur housing costs. Stipends are intended to help cover travel expenses to and from the project location, books, and ordinary living expenses. Stipends are taxable.

NEH Summer Scholars are required to attend all scheduled meetings and to engage fully as professionals in all project activities.  Participants who do not complete the full tenure of the project will receive a reduced stipend.

At the end of the workshop, NEH Summer Scholars will be asked to provide an assessment of their workshop experience, especially in terms of its value to their personal and professional development.  These confidential online evaluations will become a part of the project’s grant file. 

How to Apply

Before you attempt to complete an application, please study this project website, which contains detailed information about the topic under study, project requirements and expectations of the participants, the academic and institutional setting, and specific provisions for lodging and subsistence.

Application Checklist

A completed application consists of the following collated items:
 > the completed application cover sheet,
 > a résumé or short biography with contact information for a professional reference, and
 > an application essay (no longer than two double-spaced pages) as outlined below.

Application Cover Sheet

The application cover sheet must be filled out online at the official website.

Please follow the prompts; be sure to indicate your first and second choices of workshop dates.  Before you click the “submit” button, print out the cover sheet and add it to your application package.  Then click “submit.”  At this point you will be asked if you want to fill out a cover sheet for another project.  If you do, follow the prompts to select the other project and repeat the process.

Note that filling out a cover sheet is not the same as applying, so there is no penalty for changing your mind and filling out a cover sheet for several projects.  A full application consists of all of the items listed above, submitted to the project director.

You must submit a separate cover sheet online for each project to which you are applying in order to generate a unique tracking number for each application. Do not copy and paste a new cover sheet.

Resume and Reference

Please include a résumé or brief biography detailing your educational qualifications and professional experience. Be sure the résumé provides the name, title, phone number, and e-mail address of one professional reference.

Application Essay

The application essay should be no more than two double‑spaced pages. The essay should address your professional background; interest in the subject of the workshop; special perspectives, skills, or experiences that would contribute to the workshop; and how the experience would enhance your teaching or school service.

Submission of Applications and Notification Procedure

Completed applications should be submitted to the project director, not the NEH, and postmarked no later than March 1, 2017. Application materials sent to the NEH will not be reviewed.

Your completed application, submitted to the project director, not the NEH, should be addressed as follows:

Crossroads of Conflict
203 Cockefair Hall
5121 Rockhill Rd
Kansas City, MO 64110

Successful applicants will be notified of their selection on March 31, 2017, and they will have until April 7, 2017 to accept or decline the offer.

For more information please click "Further Official Information" below the announcement.


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http://cas2.umkc.edu/nehborderwars/Default.asp

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