“My Own Commander”: The Civil War Journal of J. J. Sitton, 1863–1865 recounts the experiences of a young Confederate soldier from Washington County, Missouri, who fought in Mississippi before returning home to recruit men and ride with Sterling Price on a last-ditch effort to capture Missouri for the South.
Momentous events from the civil rights movement and the President Kennedy assassination to 9/11 are distilled into elemental images in the work of Tom Engelhardt, longtime political cartoonist with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Selections of Engelhardt’s evocative drawings from the State Historical Society of Missouri’s art collection are accompanied by narratives from art historian and SHSMO curator Joan Stack that add context and reveal artistic influences and techniques.
Growing up during the Great Depression and World War II, Ike Skelton dreamed of joining the military. That dream was shattered when he contracted one of the most dreaded diseases of the era: polio. Far from abandoning hope, he received treatment at Warm Springs, Georgia, overcame his disability, and went on to become a college athlete, a celebrated lawyer, a Missouri state senator, and a US congressman.
Gert Goebel arrived in Franklin County, Missouri, in 1834, an eighteen-year-old caught up in the early stages of a transformative immigration wave that eventually brought more than one hundred thousand newcomers from Germany to Missouri (and several million to America). Four decades later, Goebel drew from his range of experiences as a pioneer farmer, wide-ranging hunter, county surveyor, and state legislator to write a vivid and insightful memoir describing German settlement, state politics, and Civil War events within Missouri.
The majority of the letters in this volume were written to Bingham’s close friend James S. Rollins, a wealthy mid-Missouri lawyer, politician, and father of the University of Missouri. In these letters, the artist-cum-politician describes his work on paintings and discusses political issues and candidates of the day—from the early years of the Whig Party in Missouri to the Unionists and Radicals of the Civil War period to the Democrats of the Reconstruction era.
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.
