Kansas City, Missouri, the site of the 2005 NCPH Annual Meeting, possesses an especially rich array of exhibitions, museums, and historic sites to delight public historians and tourists alike. Located near the geographical center of the United States, Kansas City has also been at the epicenter of major developments in the nation’s political, economic, and cultural history. Beginning as a trading post along the Missouri River in the early nineteenth century, Kansas City became a launching point for western travelers, the focal point of violent conflicts over slavery and western expansion, and the hub of a vibrant jazz scene. All these developments highlight Kansas City ’s key role in shaping economic as well as cultural exchange within the state, the region, and the nation. The twelve museums and exhibitions reviewed below attest to that rich history. Museums have used a variety of strategies to illuminate the relation of Kansas City and the larger region to broad historical narratives about western expansion and the development of the frontier. At the Kansas City Museum, reviewed by Karen Leathem, a wide variety of artifacts and interpretive texts illuminate how contacts among Osage Indians, white settlers, free blacks, and slaves shaped the cultural and physical contours of the frontier. The Arabia Steamboat Museum also disrupts conventional frontier narratives. Kathy Nichols’ review describes how the remarkable variety and quantity of consumer goods retrieved from a mid-nineteenth-century steamboat challenge “popular images of self-sufficiency and austerity on the frontier.” While actual interpretation of these artifacts receives only minimal attention, the mu-