Grant Helps Fund Additional Tours on Historic Missouri Free Mobile App

WARRENSBURG, MO -- Historic Missouri, a free mobile app and website that provides users easy access to information about the important places, people, and stories that are unique to Missouri, has added 11 additional tours funded in part by a Missouri Humanities large grant of $10,000.

Developed by the faculty and students in the Department of History at the University of Central Missouri, the Historic Missouri mobile application and website provides interpretive and curated narrative tours that will help site visitors learn more about different locations and their history by reading about them and  viewing photos of people and places from the past.

Graduate students in the Master of Arts in History program and undergraduate students in the Bachelor of Arts/Bachelor of Science program researched, wrote, and uploaded the content to Historic Missouri for the following tours:  Sedalia Missouri Historical Highlights Tour, Historic Pertle Springs Resort Warrensburg Missouri Tour, Chillicothe Missouri Historical Highlights Tour, Missouri’s Little Dixie African American Historical Highlights Tour, Marble Hill Missouri Tour, Concordia and Emma Missouri Historical Tour, Sweet Springs Missouri Tour, Lamar Missouri Historical Tour, Kansas City Missouri’s 18th and Vine Tour, Pleasant Hill Missouri Historical Highlights Tour, and Bolivar Missouri Historical Tour. A list of all of the tours featured on Historic Missouri is linked here.

Historic Missouri Project Director and Professor of History, Dr. Jon Taylor, noted, “The Missouri Humanities grant more than doubled the number of tours now featured on Historic Missouri and additional tours will be added by the end of 2024. The Missouri Humanities grant increased the capacity for graduate and undergraduate students to engage in scholarly research that was developed for a public audience.”

Taylor praised the critical role that the UCM Office of Sponsored Programs and Research Integrity played in securing and overseeing the grant. 

A UCM Master of Arts in History graduate student, Anna Furney, spoke about the opportunity to get involved in the project, noting, “The most important thing I learned by working on the Historic Missouri tours was how to further develop my research skills. Sometimes it can be hard to find information on a particular historic site due to lack of digitization or recordkeeping, but I was able to uncover new resources, databases, and helpful individuals in local historical societies that greatly aided my research. I had never before worked on a project where the source of information I used was so diversified. This is very important to honing one’s skills as a historian, and to be able to work with a variety (or lack thereof) of sources was a great experience for me.”

For more information about Historic Missouri please contact Taylor via email at jtaylor01@ucmo.edu.