Missouri’s bicentennial year brought many organizations together to create new and expanding digital resources for citizens learning more about state history. Students, teachers, researchers, and the general public will find learning aids in many different subjects, including a new registry of past Missouri-based artists, a digital exhibit that explores Missouri’s struggle for statehood, and curriculum that teaches the history of Missouri courts. History timelines, a Missouri constitution quiz, and online history exhibits are among the free resources available to help people understand Missouri and its past of more than 200 years.
The Missouri timeline, developed by staff of the State Historical Society of Missouri, begins with ancestral Missouri from A.D. 1250 to present day and offers photos, artworks, maps, manuscripts, documents, and other images from the society’s vast collections, with narrative text accompanying each growing digital resources used to commemorate the bicentennial.
“Many hours of staff and volunteer time have developed these resources to broaden the public’s understanding of the culture, people, institutions, places, and events that continue to shape Missouri,” said Beth Pike, who has been working on the planning of Missouri’s bicentennial year and helped to create the Missouri timeline project. “While these digital resources were created and/or expanded to commemorate Missouri’s 200th year of statehood, these links will continue well past the bicentennial year and, hopefully, engage people of all ages to learn from our past and to think about how we want to be as Missourians in the future.”
A new online resource titled “Making Missouri”, created by the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis, offers primary sources, video content, and custom plans for grades K-12. Another curriculum developed for elementary schools called “Four Years to Statehood” comes from Missouri Council for History Education and covers the years between Missouri’s first petition to become a state and its final admission to the Union.
Additional Missouri history educational resources from Missouri Humanities Council, Missouri Secretary of State, The Supreme Court of Missouri, Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, Missouri Legislative Library, and more can be found on the educational resource page at www.missouri2021.org.
