Missouri history, one place at a time.
Our Missouri treats the state as a layered historical landscape, moving from St. Louis mounds and Mississippi River travel to caves and state parks. Sean Rost guides careful interviews with guests who connect local places to broader Missouri memory.
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Our Missouri is a steady, archive-minded history show about Missouri as a lived and interpreted place. It favors grounded conversations over broad survey lectures. A single site can open into centuries of movement, conflict, preservation, and memory. Recent episodes in the Origins series examine Indigenous Missourians, Van Meter State Park, Mound City, Jolliet and Marquette, The Shattered Cross, and Ste. Genevieve National Historical Park. The result is a map of Missouri built from rivers, mounds, routes, books, cultural centers, and protected buildings. Sean Rost’s role is conversational and guiding, asking guests to slow down and explain what visitors, students, or curious residents might miss. The show often returns to Native history, including Cahokia, tribal movement, Oneota culture, allotment, and the responsibility of understanding dispossession. It also treats St. Louis as a place with older Indigenous origins, not just a later settlement date. Other episodes move along the Mississippi River Valley with French explorers, missionaries, trade routes, portage, cordilage, and uncertain early maps. The park-focused conversations add another register. At Van Meter, the discussion turns to cultural exhibits and the tribes represented there. At Ste. Genevieve, preserved architecture and partnership with the wider community become central. In the Cave State arc, Missouri’s landscape gets the same historical patience. Devil’s Icebox and Connor’s Cave bring in cave safety, endangered species, wild cave conditions, and the ethics of leaving sensitive ecosystems alone. Roaring River adds glade restoration, invasive species control, biological monitoring, and Ozark plant life. The show’s pace is deliberate. Its curiosity is practical. It is made for listeners who want Missouri history to feel documented, local, and specific, with enough texture to change how a park visit, river crossing, or old neighborhood reads.
Made for: Best for regional history listeners, Missouri residents, park visitors, teachers, researchers, and anyone interested in how local places preserve public memory. It also suits road-trip listening with a historical bent.
What sets it apart: The show pairs historical research with site-level interpretation from guests and park staff. Its strength is making Missouri’s physical landscape feel connected to Indigenous history, colonial travel, preservation work, and natural-resource stewardship.
Discussions on the people, places, and events that have helped to shape the Show-Me State.
That St. Louis map in your head has room for a mound-shaped correction.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A map of Missouri's origins becomes a story of portage, river currents, and hard-won persistence.
This Our Missouri episode gives Missouri's origins a hard physical scale. In conversation with Sean Rost, Dr. Jones follows a punishing route from Montreal or Quebec through the Great Lakes, the Chicago region, the Illinois River Valley, and on to the Mississippi River.
A river expedition becomes a measured study of uncertainty, ambition, and early Missouri history.
Jolliet and Marquette emerge as men moving through a world defined by gaps in knowledge. With no reliable maps to lean on, Jolliet's mission rested on basic but consequential questions: whether the Mississippi and Ohio were one river, and where the Mississippi finally emptied.
A measured look at Indigenous St. Louis and the responsibility carried by its mound history.
Mound City opens onto the Indigenous history of St. Louis by following Sean Rost and Cleary through the city's relationship to the mounds that once stood along the Mississippi.
Black Hills history, told on location.
Vegas history with a barstool pulse.
Connecticut history with national echoes.
Texas history, sourced and road-tested.
Maine history, widened through public talks.
Sean Rost interviews Rachel Davidson, superintendent of Ste.
Sean Rost interviews Linda Carol Jones about her book on Catholic missionaries along the Mississippi River, part of a series leading up to the US semi-quincentennial.
Mark Wolczynski argues that the French expeditions of Louis Joliet and Jacques Marquette can only be understood by going back to Jesuit Relations, colonial documents, and original maps rather than later summaries.
Professor Patricia Cleary discusses her book 'Mound City' and the Indigenous history of St.
John Hagermann discusses the history and significance of Van Meter State Park and Missouri's American Indian Cultural Center as part of the Origins series leading up to the US semi-quincentennial.
Greg Olson says 27,000 Missourians claimed Indigenous ancestry, despite history classes implying Indigenous people disappeared.
Our Missouri Episode 120 takes Sean Ross into Rockbridge Memorial State Park to examine Missouri’s Cave State identity and Devil’s Icebox.
At Roaring River State Park, natural resource ecologist Murphy Kindoll links the park's spring, caves, and Ozark ecosystems to its history and recreation.
Sean Rost interviews Alex Primm about his book 'Ozark Voices: Oral Histories from the Heartland' and his career as an oral historian in the Missouri Ozarks.
An interview with Sydney J.
Matthew Hulbert discusses his new book on John Newman Edwards, a Confederate propagandist who shaped the Lost Cause narrative in Missouri.
Susan Croce Kelly discusses her new book about Lucille Morris Upton, a newspaperwoman of the Ozarks.
Sean Ross interviews historian Joseph Beilein Jr.