Civil War on the Western Border: The Missouri-Kansas Conflict, 1854–1865

Abstract

In a foreword article to the Civil War on the Western Border (cwwb) Web site, the Kansas City Star journalist Rick Montgomery confesses his initial ignorance of the complex, vicious, and fascinating war along the Missouri-Kansas border. With a chronology that begins long before the shots at Fort Sumter and a spatial configuration that alters familiar “Blue States” and “Gray States” into confusion, the border war was simultaneously a microcosm of the larger Civil War and a sui generis event. What follows Montgomery's opening essay is a spectacularly comprehensive user-friendly site on the Kansas-Missouri border war. Hosted by the Kansas City Public Library but drawing upon contributions from dozens of organizations in Kansas and Missouri, cwwb offers users as much detail on the war experience as archival records. A bar along the top of the home page of the site includes options for clickable maps, a multitopic timeline, nine scholarly essays, a gallery of images owned by participating institutions, and lesson plans for teachers. The bar also has a link to a border-war encyclopedia with entries written by numerous scholars on various topics including battles, biographies, locations, and concepts. A search window and browser tool leads to thousands of digitized, annotated, and transcribed documents. Also on the home page is a monthly “Featured Document,” annotated by the project's director, Jason Roe, of the Kansas City Public Library.