About Hidden in Plain Sight

What You’ll Discover Across Missouri

Hidden in Plain Sight explores Missouri history through the people, places, and stories that have shaped the state across centuries. Each episode is grounded in a real location—historic sites, courthouses, community centers, and landscapes—connecting listeners directly to the history beneath their feet.

Across the series, mother-daughter team Margot McMillen and Heather Roberson travel to places like Trail of Tears State Park in Cape Girardeau County, the Historic Daniel Boone Home in St. Charles County, the Old Courthouse in St. Louis, and the Mark Twain Birthplace in St. Charles County. Along the way, they uncover stories of Native nations, westward expansion, slavery and resistance, women’s suffrage, civil rights, conservation, literature, and community-building across Missouri.

The podcast serves as a resource for history enthusiasts, educators, libraries, and anyone interested in Missouri’s past and present. Join us as we travel Missouri and learn more about the people and places whose stories are often overlooked, including:

• Olive Vanbibber Boone and the women of the frontier

• Ignon Ouaconison, of the Missouria tribe

• Sacred Sun, of the Osage tribe

• Virginia and Francis Minor, who launched an unsuccessful, but pathbreaking legal case on behalf of women’s suffrage (St. Louis)

• Celia Newsom, an enslaved woman executed for daring to defend herself, whose descendants and supporters have long worked to honor her and teach her story (Callaway County)

• Mother Martha Jane Chisley Tolton, who escaped slavery in Missouri with her three children, including her son who would one day become Father Augustus Tolton, the first known African-American Catholic Priest in the United States (Rawls County)

• Laura Redden Searing, a deaf woman who became a poet and journalist during the Civil War (Fulton)

• Annie White Baxter, elected to public office before women could vote (Jasper County)

• Alma Nash, who led an all-women’s marching band onto a national stage (Maryville)

• Bess Wallace Truman, who with Harry S. Truman made a presidential life in the style of Missouri (Independence)

• Dorothy Gallagher, who leveraged her wealth to help Kansas City’s Latino community create the city’s Guadalupe Center, the country’s longest continuously-operating organization serving Latinos (Kansas City)

• Kathy Love, retired longtime editor of The Missouri Conservationist, who shares stories of Missouri conservation history, and of the Ozarks’ own Shannondale Community, which restored the forest after loggers laid it bare in the 1930s (Shannon County).

• Clara Clemens, the daughter of Mark Twain who worked to preserve his legacy, and his boyhood home (Florida)

Episodes feature conversations with historians, educators, archivists, and community members, including:

• Chris Otto, English professor, Jefferson College

• Will Chavez, Cherokee Nation

• Benjamin Gall, St. Charles County Parks Department

• Kami Ahrens, Historic Daniel Boone Home

• Cynthia Holmes, National Votes for Women Trail

• Pam Westbrook-Hodge, descendant of Celia Newsom

• Casondra Turner, descendant of Celia Newsom

• Bishop Joseph Perry, of the Chicago Archdiocese, and chief postulator of the cause to canonize Father Augustus Tolton

• Charlie Davis, Jasper County Clerk

• Paul Rojas, Board member of Kansas City Guadalupe Centers, and the first Latino elected to public office in Missouri

• Elyssa Ford, public historian and professor, Northwest Missouri State University

• Melissa Middleswart, Nodaway County Historical Society

• Jeffrey B. Wade, National Park Service and Harry S. Truman Historic Home, retired

• Kathy Love, conservation historian

• Marianne Bodine, site historian, Mark Twain Memorial Shrine