Kansas City Regional Histories B

Kansas City Regional Histories Bookshelf

The State Historical Society of Missouri Research Center-Kansas City (SHSMO Research Center-KC) has brought together the some of the key Kansas City regional history books and journals that are now available on http://books.google.com/books. These PDF files are fully searchable. Additionally, an earlier SHSMO Research Center-KC project, the Kansas City Regional Histories Index provides a single Histories Index so that a number of regional history books, many newer than are available on Google Books, may be searched at one time.

We have been selective in the books and journals listed here. Others may be available at http://books.google.com/books particularly since that collection continues to grow as more works are digitized and processed. Also some standard sources that are not directly related to Kansas City Regional History but contain valuable and useful information are now accessible in digital form, such as the The War of the Rebellion: a compilation of the official records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Other sources of Kansas City regional texts that have been digitized may be found at http://digital.library.umsystem.edu/ (as an example Howard L. Conard's 1901 Encyclopedia of the History of Missouri) and The Kansas Collection which contains a number of Kansas related books and articles.

It is also our intent to digitize and include in this Bookshelf books and journals from the WHMC-KC collections.

List of books and journals

Using these sources, all pre-1923, may prove very helpful, but can also have pitfalls that you should consider.

Not all the sources are equal. Many of even the mainline history books retrace and repeat information given in earlier works. But some depend on secondary information more than others. An interesting study of this practice is The Usable Past: A Study of Historical Traditions in Kansas City, by R. Richard Wohl and A. Theodore Brown.
The nature of the digitization and character recognition processes are less than perfect meaning that a Key word search may yield less "hits" than actually exist in the text. one useful option is to check the index, if the book has one, which would have been digitized as part of the book.
Key word searches may yield unexpected results. Common words or words that are part of other words may give you unhelpful hits. Use the advanced search tools to control this if you wish. But sometimes these odd results can be interesting and useful – they add serendipity to your search.

We hope you find this Bookshelf and Index useful in your research into the Kansas City regional rich history. Your comments and suggestions for this project would be most welcome. Please send them to David Boutros, Assistant Director, SHSMO Research Center-KC.

Search the Kansas City Regional Histories Index

State Historical Society of Missouri Research Center-Kansas City
302 Newcomb Hall, University of Missouri-Kansas City
5123 Holmes Street, Kansas City, MO 64110-2499
(816) 235-1543 WHMCKC@umkc.edu

Last revised: Tuesday, October 04, 2011