IPhD Student Wins Award from the Missouri Conference on History

IPhD student, Jisung Lee, receiving an award from the president of the Missouri Conference on History, Dr. Jeremy McNeely.

IPhD student Jisung Lee won the Lynn and Kristen Morrow Missouri History Student Prize from the Missouri Conference on History. His essay, “The Abandoned West: The First Year of the Western Sanitary Commission, 1861-1862,” was awarded the Morrow prize for the best student paper on an aspect of Missouri History presented at the conference. This essay is part of Lee’s dissertation under the supervision of Dr. Diane Mutti Burke and was written in Dr. Drew Bergerson’s Fall 2022 Research Seminar.

Lee was recognized during the Missouri Conference on History awards ceremony on March 17, 2023 in Springfield.

Graduate Student and Clio Intern Featured on UMKC Today

Katy Anielak, an MA Public History Emphasis student, was featured on UMKC Today. The March 3, 2023 article, “UMKC Student Develops Kansas City Women’s History Trail App,” discusses Anielak’s internship developing content for the Clio app.

CMS Associate Director Quoted in the Kansas City Star

Dr. Sandra Enríquez, CMS Associate Director and assistant professor of history and director of the Public History Emphasis, was quoted in an article in the Kansas City Star on November 6, 2022. In, “Trails, rails, revolution: How 4 Kansas City neighborhoods became hubs of Hispanic culture,” Dr. Enríquez shared how Latinx immigrants have historically transformed Kansas City enclaves into spaces of cultural celebration and belonging.

Conversations with Dr. Sheryll Cashin, October 20 & 27, 2022

The UMKC History Department and Center for Midwestern Studies invite you to two upcoming events featuring Dr. Sheryll Cashin, the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law, Civil Rights and Social Justice at Georgetown University. Dr. Cashin is an acclaimed author who writes about race relations and inequality in the United States. Her most recent book, White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality, examines how government-backed policies created and have maintained a residential caste that has concentrated poverty in African American neighborhoods while promoting opportunity in white areas. Most importantly, Cashin’s work offers a blueprint to dismantle longstanding racial inequality in urban America.

Divided Cities: The Effects of Redlining and Residential Segregation on American Communities
Thursday, October 20, 2022
4:00-5:30 pm
Zoom
Click Here to Register

The pandemic and summer 2020 social justice movements revealed continuing racial wounds and disparities in communities across the United States. Sheryll Cashin’s arguments about the foundations of residential segregation and her calls to build an integrated and equitable future speak to community healing in times of strife. Cashin will share her research and insights on this important and timely topic as well as engage in an interdisciplinary dialogue with UMKC faculty that focuses more directly on Kansas City. Exploring the history of redlining and its legacies in a local context will provide a moment to reflect on this important history and its connection to Kansas City from multiple perspectives, recognize continuing inequities in our communities, and consider (and plan) a better future together.

This event is part of the Marilyn T. & Byron C. Shutz Lecture Series

Segregation, Redlining, and Opportunity Hoarding: A Case for Reform
Thursday, October 27, 2022
Reception: 5:30 pm; Program begins at 6:00 pm
Truman Auditorium – Plaza Branch of the Kansas City Public Library
RSVP Here

A century ago, the tool was blatant redlining. Today, the mechanics of anti-Black housing segregation entail resistance to affordable housing, underinvestment in public transportation, and the over-policing of African American communities.

Those practices have rendered geographic lines “that divide America into racialized spaces of high and low opportunity,” Georgetown University’s Sheryll Cashin says. She calls it residential caste, a social and economic stratification cemented by discriminatory policies that trap Black people in impoverished neighborhoods while diverting funding to affluent, predominantly white areas.

Cashin’s presentation will examine how our country got here and what it will take to end these corrosive exclusionary practices in a discussion drawing from her book White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality.

The presentation will also be livestreamed on the Kansas City’s Public Library YouTube account.

These events have been funded by the Marilyn T. Byron C. Shutz and the Bernardin Haskell Lecture Funds. The programs were organized in partnership with the Johnson County Museum and the Kansas City Public Library, as part of a collaborative initiative across Greater Kansas City to host public dialogues complimenting the Johnson County Museum’s temporary exhibit REDLINED: Cities, Suburbs, and Segregation. These efforts aim to foster conversations about redlining and the consequences of residential segregation to catalyze civic action in the region.

Clio App featured on UMKC Today

Associate Director Dr. David Trowbridge was interviewed for an article “Clio App puts Local History on a National Stage.” Dr. Trowbridge shared the history of the Clio app and how it brings history to public audiences with UMKC Today.

CMS Director Contributes to Dialogue Around Renaming a Johnson County Creek

Dr. Diane Mutti Burke, CMS Director and Professor of History, along with Dr. Deb Keating (IPhD alumna, 2021), were hired as a research consultants to uncover the history of a creek in Johnson County. Their efforts have been highlighted in several media outlets.

Push continues to change name of Johnson County creek that many find offensive,” KSNT, March 24, 2021.
“Kansas county mulls changing creek’s racially loaded name,” NBC News, March 29, 2021.
“Controversial name, history of Johnson County creek leads to possible name change,” KSHB, August 26, 2021.

Guadalupe Centers Centennial Project Wins National Accolades

Kansas City’s Guadalupe Centers: A Century of Serving the Latino Community has been recognized with 2 awards from the American Association for State and Local History.

This multifaceted Public History project is a collaboration from the Guadalupe Centers, Inc., the History Department and Center for Midwestern Studies, UMKC Latinx and Latin American Studies Program, Tico Productions, LLC, and the Kansas City Public Library. Their efforts included an exhibit, a documentary, public programming, and an ongoing archival project to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the organization.

The Guadalupe Centennial project received AASLH’S Award of Excellence, and is one of three projects recognized with the History In Progress Award. The HIP Award is given to projects that are “highly inspirational, exhibits exceptional scholarship, and/or is exceedingly entrepreneurial in terms of funding, partnerships, or collaborations, creative problem solving, or unusual project design and inclusiveness.”

In addition, the project was selected as an honorable mention for the Alice Smith Public History Prize from the Midwestern History Association.

Congratulations to Dr. Sandra Enríquez, Dr. Theresa Torres (LLAS), graduate student Hunter Albright, our Public History students who worked on the project, and all of the collaborators!

Wide-Open Town: Kansas City in the Pendergast Era, January 9, 2019

On Wednesday, January 9, at the Plaza Branch of the Kansas City Public Library (4801 Main Street, Kansas City, MO 64112), Diane Mutti Burke, John Herron, and Jason Roe will discuss their edited volume, Wide-Open Town: Kansas City in the Pendergast Era.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Kansas City was ruled by political boss Tom Pendergast, Prohibition was loosely enforced, and urban vice was rampant. But this “openness” allowed many in a community divided by race and class to challenge social boundaries. Wide-Open Town highlights the diverse histories of Kansas City at a time of transformational change in American society.

Mutti Burke is chair of the history department and director of the Center for Midwestern Studies at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Herron is associate dean and a professor of history at UMKC. Roe is digital history specialist at the Kansas City Public Library.

CMS Director Quoted in The New York Times

Dr. Diane Mutti Burke, Chair of the UMKC History Department and Director of the Center for Midwestern Studies, was quoted in an article in The New York Times on August 6, 2018. The article, “On a Civil Rights Trail,” referenced Dr. Mutti Burke’s research into the history of slavery in Missouri.

UMKC History iPhD K. David Hanzlick Publishes Book with U. MO Press

Congratulations to K. David Hanzlick, alumnus of the History iPhD program, on the publication of his book, Benevolence, Moral Reform, Equality: Women’s Activism in Kansas City, 1870-1940, with the University of Missouri Press.

Hanzlick traces the rise and evolution of women’s activism in a rapidly growing, Midwestern border city, one deeply scarred by the Civil War and struggling to determine its meaning. Over the course of 70 years, women in Kansas City emerged from the domestic sphere by forming and working in female-led organizations to provide charitable relief, reform society’s ills, and ultimately claim space for themselves as full participants in the American polity. Focusing on the social construction of gender, class, and race, and the influence of political philosophy in shaping responses to poverty, Hanzlick also considers the ways in which city politics shaped the interactions of local activist women with national women’s groups and male-led organizations.

K. David Hanzlick is Director of Program and Development for Sheffield Place, a treatment and transitional living program for homeless mothers and children. He also serves as an adjunct faculty member in the Nonprofit Leadership Program at Rockhurst University and the Hauptmann School of Public Affairs at Park University.