Calendar

Historical archeologist Erin Whitson examines one of the darkest times in our nation as 60,000 Native Americans were forced from their ancestral lands on the deadly Trail of Tears to Oklahoma. In 1889, Wahnenauhi (Lucy Keys), a survivor of the infamous “Trail of Tears”, wrote, that “despair in its thickest blackness” settled down on the Chiefs of the Cherokee as they prepared their people to relocate from their traditional homelands to “Indian Territory” in 1838.

Join us for the National History Day in Missouri state contest, administered by The State Historical Society of Missouri. The contest will take place in-person at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Sign up to be a judge and support Missouri students! Top-ranking state projects will go on to compete in the national contest run by the NHD office in College Park, Maryland.

Sign Up to Judge Here

The Vietnam War came to an end 50 years ago when North Vietnam troops captured Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam on April 30, 1975. Among the U.S. troops fighting in Vietnam, 147,403 soldiers were from Missouri. One of these veterans, born in Missouri and raised in Columbia, tells his personal journey from war to reconciliation. Larry Rottmann served as a lieutenant with the 25th infantry Division during 1967-68. Since his service, Rottmann has made 23 post-war visits to Vietnam.

True stories about war, accompanied by original live music, will be presented by four miliary veterans: Larry Rottmann, Springfield, Tim Burrows, Nixa, Mike O’Brien, Boise, Idaho, and Eli Redstone of Gainesville, Florida. Fifty years after the last soldier left Vietnam, our nation’s historical and cultural memories the Vietnam War have been shaped by movies, books, and other influences. Among the common storylines are the brutal and inhuman enemy and the atrocities and casualties of war. Lost in that depiction is the humanity, if even for a moment.

Kathleen Seale, coordinator of the SHSMO’s Rolla and Springfield Research Centers digs into a unique SHSMO collection that details a 1950s film technology developed by two Rolla theatre owners Rowe Carney and Tom Smith. Their invention of the rotoscope used a special single camera for filming and a cinema system to project movies in a 180-degree spectrum on a curved screen. The rotoscope was ahead of its time and well before the IMAX motion picture technology emerged. Seale's presentation includes historic film clips shot in Rolla, Mo. using the rotoscope.