It feels like my area is just devoid of any written history compared to everywhere else in America, but surely that's not true. When I read the Wikipedia article about the history of the Ozarks it (no joke) has nothing written there. I tried looking for some national historic landmarks and there aren't any really. Even the towns around here aren't really named after people, and the towns that do have cool things don't really document it that well compared to other places. As a person who is new to history research, there's just not a lot to go off of to know how to find more.
I just want to get a feel for the place I'm from, like who were the pioneers, what brought people here, what made them stay, what was life like here in the old days and maybe what people from other areas thought of the area or if the opinion of the area has changed at all throughout the years.
I'll take any cool information but I'm mostly interested in, say the 1800s up to WW2.
Edit: I understand the Ozarks was kind of an area for people trying to stay out of the history books, and I'm okay with that. I'll take anything, I like information that helps me get a feel for what everyday life is like (a quest for immersion) so even seemingly mundane details are very interesting to me.
You're right, it's harder to find stuff on the Ozarks specifically that isn't something like Being a History of the Women's Club of the Disciples of Christ in Douglas County, Missouri, 1890-1891, Together with the Letters of the Most Reverend H.R.R.Q. Cane. (Obviously I'm making that up, but you get the idea). It's out there, though!
The best place to start is Brooks Blevins' three-volume history of the Ozarks, conveniently called A History of the Ozarks. The bad news is the volume 3 hasn't been published yet--the University of Illinois Press website says October--and volume 2 only goes up through the late 19th century/aftermath of the Civil War. But the first two volumes are really, really good; relatively affordable; and more accessibly written than a lot of history books.
And unfortunately, Blevins comes down pretty hard with criticism of a lot of the earlier books that stressed the importance of Scots-Irish ethnicity with respect to the settlement and culture of the Ozarks. So it's hard for me to recommend some of the other stuff that I might have a couple of years ago. (Vol. 1 was published in 2018, but I didn't read it until last year.)
Blevins does, and I find this really cool, recommend Donald Harington's The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, which is actually fiction! He thinks it does a good job embodying the general culture of the era, the mid-esque 19th century.
One book that might interest you, but does lean a little too hard on the "Ozarks as internal Other" theme, is Robert K. Gilmore's Ozark Baptizings, Hangings, and Other Diversions: Theatrical Folkways of Rural Missouri, 1885-1910, which is not a history of theatre in Branson, but rather a look inside Ozarks public culture in that time period.