About Missouri

Missouri takes its name from the Missouri River and the Missouri people, a Siouan-speaking nation who lived along the river. The word "Missouri" is believed to come from a Miami-Illinois word meaning "town of the large canoes" or possibly from an Algonquian word meaning "people with wooden canoes." French explorers who encountered the Missouri people in the late 1600s recorded the name for the river, and it was applied to the territory when the United States acquired it as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Missouri became a state in 1821 as part of the Missouri Compromise, which attempted to balance the admission of slave and free states as the nation expanded westward.

Missouri occupies the geographic and historical heart of the United States, a state that borders more other states than almost any other, sits at the confluence of the nation's two greatest river systems, and served for over a century as the literal departure point for Americans heading west. Every wagon train on the Oregon Trail, every prospector headed for California, every Mormon pioneer bound for Utah, they all came through Missouri first. The Gateway Arch that rises 630 feet above the St. Louis riverfront is not just a monument to a city; it is the nation's monument to its own westward ambition.

Missouri is also a state of remarkable cultural production. Mark Twain grew up on the Mississippi River in Hannibal and gave the world Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Walt Disney grew up in Marceline and Kansas City and built an entertainment empire whose aesthetic was shaped by Missouri small-town life. T.S. Eliot was born in St. Louis. Langston Hughes was born in Joplin. Chuck Berry invented the guitar riff in St. Louis. The Kansas City jazz scene produced Charlie Parker. Harry Truman from Independence made the decision that ended World War II.

Missouri today is a purple state turned reliably red at the presidential and statewide level, even as Kansas City and St. Louis remain Democratic strongholds. It is a state with a sophisticated urban economy, aerospace, healthcare, financial services, automotive manufacturing, and a vast, deeply conservative rural hinterland. The tension between those two Missouris is the defining political dynamic of the state and, in many ways, of the nation.