Connie Yen, who is now the director of the Greene County Archives, earned her MA in History from MSU, with an emphasis on Ozarks Studies, in the summer of 2015. Brooks Blevins served as chair of her thesis committee. Her MA thesis, “Horse-Stealing and Man-Hanging: An Examination of Vigilantism in the Missouri Ozarks,” was uploaded to BearWorks, MSU’s institutional repository, on October 28, 2016. In sixteen months that thesis has been downloaded 2,839 times, making it by far the most-downloaded document in BearWorks. To whet your appetite, here is the abstract:

The purpose of this thesis is to determine what factors did or did not have an impact on the formation of the Slickers, the Regulators, and the Sons of Honor, three vigilante organizations that formed in the Missouri Ozarks during the nineteenth century. Primary source documents indicate that vigilante organizations formed in Missouri, and throughout the United States, for a variety of reasons. This study disproves the theory that vigilante violence in the Missouri Ozarks was based on any social or political struggle between an old or new order. This study contributes to our understanding of Ozarks history, as well as the history of Missouri and the study of vigilante violence in the United States.