Books

Born in Clarence, and reared in Carrollton, Missouri, Fred Geary worked as a commercial artist for nearly thirty years at the Fred Harvey Company in Kansas City and was celebrated as a woodcut artist.

The State Historical Society of Missouri holds the largest collection of his original prints in the nation.

On the border between the Union and the Confederacy, and divided by the allegiances of its residents to the cultures of the North and the South, Missouri could not avoid conflict during the American Civil War. The articles chosen by William Garrett Piston for this anthology show that no region of the state, no racial or ethnic group, and neither gender escaped the trials of the war. With a deliberate emphasis on military history, Piston argues for “its centrality to understanding the most significant conflict in our nation’s history.”

Explore the history of St. Louis as it transitioned from the Mound City to the Gateway City. Immigrants, domestic and foreign arrived seeking new freedoms and economic opportunity. Sectional differences exacerbated disputes and slowed progress. Racial tensions rose and fell as blacks and whites struggled with slavery, segregation, and civil rights. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century wars restricted personal rights and, incongruously, enabled African Americans and women to gain a toehold in fields formerly closed to them.

Missourians spend their time away from work in a variety of ways. Video and computer gaming, attending sporting events and movies, exercising, or listening to music appeal to many of us. The articles in Filling Leisure Hours: Essays from the Missouri Historical Review, 1906-2006 discuss several of the pastimes enjoyed by Missourians during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Editor Alan Havig has selected essays that describe popular arts and entertainments rather than high culture amusements.

The Kansas City area has long been a place of intersection in American life. Here where the Missouri River turns east to start its run across Missouri, European Americans interacted with Native Americans, the populated East scattered to explore and inhabit the sparsely settled West, and North and South fought over the relationship between white and black. In the twentieth century, Kansas City served as the urban center for an extensive rural region, and reformers dueled with political bossism and organized crime.