Jarod Roll is a professor of history at the University of Mississippi, where he teaches modern American history. His research explores the working-class experience and popular economic thought, particularly in rural America. He is the author of Poor Man's Fortune: White Working-Class Conservatism in American Metal Mining, 1850-1950 (2020), and Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the New Cotton South (2010), which won the Herbert G. Gutman Prize, the Missouri History Book Award, and the C.L.R. James Award. Roll is also a coauthor of The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor's Southern Prophets in New Deal America (2011), which received the Southern Historical Association's H.L. Mitchell Prize.
There are different stories about how Missouri became known as the Show-Me State. Few of those stories, however, are true. Today the motto signifies the stalwart, salt-of-the-earth nature of the state's residents, but it originated in the 1890s as an oath of opprobrium used to denigrate Missourians for their obsequiousness and stupidity. Union miners in Colorado coined the term during an 1896 strike to mock the nonunion Missouri miners who came to the Rockies to work as strikebreakers. Missourians did not like it. Calling someone 'show-me' was an easy way to start a brawl, or a gunfight. This lecture tells that story and its consequences, including how Missouri strikebreakers transformed 'show-me,' once considered a grave insult, into a dubious badge of honor.