Robert Russell Bennett (right) with Salvatore Dell’Isola at rehearsals for the Broadway production of South Pacific. Bennett served as orchestrator for the show, and Dell’Isola as musical director. [New York Public Library Digital Collections, Billy Rose Theatre Collection Photograph File, TH-52233]

Robert Russell Bennett was born on June 15, 1894, in Kansas City, Missouri, the only son of…

Kenneth Brown Billups Sr. [National Association of Negro Musicians]

Kenneth Brown Billups Sr. was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 14, 1918, the son of…

Naomi Brooks. [Hayti (Missouri) Central High School Yearbook, 1958, via Ancestry.com]

Brooks v. Moberly was a federal court case in Missouri that tested how American…

DeVerne Calloway. [State Historical Society of Missouri, Mary K. Dains Photograph Collection, P0300-018642]

DeVerne Lee Calloway was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on June 17, 1916. She attended LeMoyne…

Ernest Calloway. [State Historical Society of Missouri, Ernest Calloway Papers (S0011), S540.267]

Ernest Calloway was born in Herberton, West Virginia, on January 1, 1909. His family became…

The Administration Building at the Missouri State Penitentiary, 1955. Missouri carried out executions at the penitentiary’s gas chamber from 1937 until switching to lethal injection in 1989 and moving its death row to the Potosi Correctional Center in Washington County. [Missouri State Archives/Missouri Digital Heritage, Mark Schreiber Collection, MS297_255_009]

With the exception of two years in the early twentieth century, the state of Missouri has always allowed the…

The Cassville and Exeter’s Railway engine number 345 was purchased in 1935. [State Historical Society of Missouri Rolla Research Center, Cassville & Exeter Railway Company Records, R0421]

One of the shortest standard-gauge railway lines in the United States was built in Barry County, Missouri, by…

Chain of Rocks Park swimming pool. [Courtesy of Joe Sonderman]

During the prosperous 1920s, Parkview Amusement Park was constructed on the western bank of the Mississippi…

Carl Chapman at an unidentified archaeological site. [University of Missouri, Museum of Anthropology and American Archaeology Division, 23SN202-2]

Carl Haley Chapman has appropriately been called the dean of Missouri archaeology, a title…

Arthur Holly Compton. [University of Chicago Library, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Photographic Archive, apf1-01878]

Arthur Holly Compton earned international recognition for his research in X-rays, sharing the 1927 Nobel Prize for…