A Kansas City native, Diane Mutti Burke, Ph.D., is an associate professor of history at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the Director of UMKC’s Center for Midwestern Studies. She is the author of a history of slaveholding and enslaved Missourians called On Slavery’s Border: Missouri’s Small-Slaveholding Households, 1815-1865, which was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2010. She is also the author of a number of articles on slavery and the Civil War in Missouri, as well as the co-editor, with Jonathan Earle, of a collection of essays on the Missouri/Kansas Border War called Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri: The Long Civil War on the Border. This collection is the product of a major public conference on the Civil War on the Border that was held at the Kansas City Public Library in November 2011. In addition, Mutti Burke is completing an edited and annotated diary of a small-slaveholding Missouri woman named Paulina Stratton and has started work on a monograph about refugee populations during the Civil War.