ASH Scholars

The ASH Border War Team researches the well-known and unknown stories surrounding one of the most contentious places and times in American history, with proslavery and antislavery forces in Missouri and Kansas squaring off on battlefields and in the backwoods and participating in a spiraling cycle of atrocities and reprisals that left an indelible mark on the region’s history and memory. Our team is developing an original narrative podcast series to shed light on the world that made the Border War to demystify and dig into the complexity of this period.

With an emphasis on sharing our work with a public audience, the Public History ASH team’s research explores the variety of ways in which the United States’ 250th anniversary is being commemorated at home and abroad and how our current experiences compare with previous milestones in American democracy. Conducting oral history interviews with community members and recording video toasts (or roasts) from international scholars, the team will create public digital projects that share what they have learned about our present moment as the United States turns 250.

This ASH team explores how states operate as laboratories of democracy that address pressing issues of the day in the face of national polarization and gridlock. We investigate how states function in a federal system and how they look to each other for policy solutions. This includes tracking bills as they work their way through the state legislative process and understanding the motivations of policymakers, with a particular emphasis on how Missouri compares to its peers. The lab is currently focused on the emergence of AI regulations, such as bans on deepfakes in political campaigns.

This project examines the creation and development of the Lake of the Ozarks. Built for private electricity generation in the depths of the Great Depression, the Lake of the Ozarks was at once the largest man-made lake in the world and since has become an (in)famous regional center of recreation and tourism with national cultural cache. Student research will range widely from the 18th century to the present day, encompassing the world of the Osage River Valley prior to inundation, including the Osage people who lived there before Missouri existed; the ideas that led to the lake’s construction; the lake’s impact on local farming communities; and its later emergence as a site of relaxation, sport, and excess consumption. Themes of study include: the politics of energy markets and economic modernization, rural social and cultural change, the relationship between private interests and public policy, and the environmental costs of development.