Some developments in the new minor in Missouri Studies: new catalog copy describing the requirements for the minor is in the works; a new course in Health Sciences is being added to the list of electives and others are being developed; the email address I made up for the above slide for the A&S screens now exists; there is now a Twitter account, @missouristudies (now that I’ve managed to convince Twitter that I am in fact human); I have learned that one of the old nicknames of the state was Mother of the West. I’m on research leave next year (working on this), but I’ll keep working on the minor and will find someone to teach the Missouri Writers course in the spring.
Other Missouriana: I had a fantastic time in February giving a paper at the Kinder Institute conference on the Missouri Crisis. I talked about race in Missouri–since before it was Missouri, during the Missouri Crisis, and today–and as it appears in two novels by William Wells Brown and Mark Twain, and I learned a ton from the actual historians (including that mentions of DeWitt Clinton are sure to get a laugh among diplomatic historians, for some reason). I am available, as one of the speakers at the Missouri Humanities Council/State Historical Society of Missouri Show Me Missouri: Conversations about Missouri’s Past, Present, and Future Speakers Bureau, to give a public version of this talk (enriched by things I learned in February) and a talk on Missouri writers. I can also now speak at some length about the history of the term doughface, should anyone be interested. There’s one taker so far, in a town (and county) I’ve never been to, so here’s hoping we can figure out the scheduling.
Samuel Cohen 