Missouri

The state whose admission forced the country to confront slavery's expansion, and which then spent forty years as the fault line. Missouri was French and then Spanish before the Louisiana Purchase, and its settlers came largely from Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia with enslaved people, so when it applied for statehood in 1819 it would have been the first slave state entirely west of the Mississippi. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 admitted it alongside Maine and drew a line across the rest of the Louisiana Purchase, banning slavery north of it - a settlement Jefferson called a fire bell in the night. The Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed that line in 1854 and Missouri border ruffians rode west to influence Kansas by force. Dred Scott sued for freedom in a St Louis court, and the Supreme Court's 1857 ruling against him held that Black people could not be citizens. The state stayed in the Union while fighting a vicious internal guerrilla war. St Louis and Kansas City grew as river and rail hubs, and the Gateway Arch commemorates westward expansion. Jefferson City is the capital. Ferguson's protests in 2014 began a national movement. Kansas City and St Louis sit at opposite ends of the state. Missouri is bordered by eight states, tied for the most. Its name comes from a Siouan people, and the pronunciation of the state's own name is locally contested. The New Madrid earthquakes of 1811 and 1812 were among the strongest recorded in North America. Mark Twain grew up at Hannibal.

• Existed: 1750 CE – present
• Type: Entity
• Government: U.S. State
• Capital: Jefferson City