Published on Show Me Mizzou Dec. 17, 2025
Photo by Mike Morgan
When Mary Grace Newman, BA ’20, MA ’21, was 12, she volunteered to narrate and record children’s books at the Wolfner Talking Book and Braille Library, located in the shadow of the Missouri State Capitol in Jefferson City. Years later, she’s a library technician at the Library of Congress, next door to the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.
Newman’s path between libraries in the two capital cities was bridged by a third domed seat of power: Jesse Hall, where she was introduced to the Kinder Institute through a freshman political science class at Mizzou. “It felt like this high-in-the-sky place on the fourth floor of Jesse,” she says. “Majoring in political science and minoring in history and constitutional democracy, I kept going back to Kinder. I kept craving that learning environment and that space where I got to ask those questions of professors and experts outside of class and see the forefront of research.”
Newman not only got to talk and read about history in the classroom, but she also had access to programs that took her to the places where these events happened, both in America and abroad. As a Kinder Scholar in Washington, D.C., she worked at the National Archives in 2018. During that summer internship, Kinder facilitated weekly field trips to the Central Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis and the Frederick Douglass House. The last visit was to the Library of Congress. “It was an amazing opportunity to tie history to the places that still exist today,” she says. “It was a big turning point for me.”
After graduating with a bachelor’s in political science, Newman was accepted to the institute’s master’s degree program in Atlantic History & Politics, which took her abroad to study at the University of Oxford’s Corpus Christi College. She returned determined to get back to D.C. and back to the stacks of the Library of Congress, an opportunity that finally presented itself in September 2023.
Two-plus years into her job there, Newman is living out her childhood dream. “I’m among the primary sources and maps, able to make collection materials more accessible to the researchers,” she says. “It’s reminiscent of my time at Kinder. I’m investing in history and education, building and possibly changing what we know.”
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