Download or read book The First Chouteaus written by William E. Foley and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than half a century, Auguste and Pierre Chouteau dominated trade and enterprise in the Mississippi Valley. In their various roles as merchants, Indian traders, bankers, land speculators, governmental advisors, public officials, and community leaders, the Chouteau brothers exerted a tremendous influence on westward expansion. This is the first full account of their lives and illustrious careers.
Download or read book French St Louis written by Jay Gitlin and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2021-08 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gateway to the West and an outpost for eastern capital and culture, St. Louis straddled not only geographical and political divides but also cultural, racial, and sectional ones. At the same time, it connected a vast region as a gathering place of peoples, cultures, and goods. The essays in this collection contextualize St. Louis, exploring French-Native relations, the agency of empire in the Illinois Country, the role of women in "mapping" the French colonial world, fashion and identity, and commodities and exchange in St. Louis as part of a broader politics of consumption in colonial America. The collection also provides a comparative perspective on America's two great Creole cities, St. Louis and New Orleans. Lastly, it looks at the Frenchness of St. Louis in the nineteenth century and the present. French St. Louis recasts the history of St. Louis and reimagines regional development in the early American republic, shedding light on its francophone history.
Download or read book Common Fields written by Andrew Hurley and published by Missouri History Museum. This book was released on 1997 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these pages, geographers, archaeologists, and historians come together to consider the enduring ties between a city's diverse residents and the physical environment on which their well-being depends.
Download or read book Opening the Ozarks written by Walter A. Schroeder and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the oldest European settlement in Missouri, Ste. Genevieve was the funnel through which the eastern Ozarks (the 5,000 square miles beyond Ste. Genevieve's location on the Mississippi) was established. A magisterial account of the settlement of this area from 1760 through 1830, Opening the Ozarks focuses on the acquisition and occupation of land, the transformation of the environment, the creation of cohesive settlements, and the building of neighborhoods and eventually organized counties. The study begins with the French Creole settlement at Old Ste. Genevieve in the middle of the eighteenth century. It describes the movement of the French into the Ozark hills during the rest of that century and continues with that of the American immigrants into Upper Louisiana after 1796, ending with the Americanization of the district after the Louisiana Purchase. Walter Schroeder examines the cultural transition from a French society, operating under a Spanish administration, to an American society in which French, Indians, and Africans formed minorities.
Download or read book Before Lewis and Clark written by Shirley Christian and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2009-05-01 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before Lewis and Clark relates the extraordinary saga of the Chouteaus, the dynastic family that guarded the gates to the West for three generations. From their St. Louis base, the Chouteaus, patrician and French in their origins, made their fortunes along the two-thousand-mile length of the Missouri River. Led by the brothers Auguste and Pierre, the family not only engaged in land speculation, finance, and the fur trade but also acted as suppliers and advisers to expeditions and enterprises between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains?including the famous expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark from 1804 to 1806. This is the story of the Old World meeting the New, of the eastern United States discovering the West, and of a wealthy, powerful, charming, and manipulative family that dominated business and politics in the Louisiana Purchase territory before and after the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Download or read book African American Lives in St Louis 1763 1865 written by Dale Edwyna Smith and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2017-02-22 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The African American presence in St. Louis began in 1763 with the arrival of several free men of color who accompanied Pierre Laclede from New Orleans to set up a fur trading fort on the Mississippi. Within a few decades, the fort had become a prosperous commercial center whose proximity to the western frontier attracted a cosmopolitan community. African Americans in St. Louis--both slave and free--enjoyed greater autonomy and opportunity than those in urban areas of the South and East. Slaves in the city set legal precedent by filing hundreds of freedom suits, often based on the prohibition against slavery set by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. After a century in the region, many blacks enlisted in the Union Army during the Civil War. Drawing on a wide range of sources, the author studies the history of slaves and free blacks in this city.
Download or read book Dictionary of Missouri Biography written by Lawrence O. Christensen and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 1999-10 with total page 860 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Brothers Robidoux and the Opening of the American West written by Robert J. Willoughby and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2012-11-01 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in a unique biographical format, Robert Willoughby interweaves the stories of six brothers who shaped the American trans-Mississippi West during the first five decades of the nineteenth century. After migrating from French Canada to St. Louis, the brothers Robidoux—Joseph, Francois, Antoine, Louis, Michel, and Isadore—and their father, Joseph, became significant members in the business, fur trading, and land speculation communities, frequently interacting with upper-class members of the French society. Upon coming of age, the brothers followed their father into the fur business and American Indian trade. The oldest of the six, Joseph, led the group on an expedition up the Missouri River as Lewis and Clark had once done, designating a path of trade sites along their journey until they reached their destination at present-day Omaha, Nebraska. Eventually the younger brothers set out on their own westward expedition in the mid 1820s, reaching both Colorado and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Joseph eventually became a town founder in northwest Missouri near Blacksnake Creek. Antoine and Louis traveled as far as California, finally settling in Santa Fe where they became prominent citizens. As a trapper and trader, Michel endured many hardships and close calls during his journey across the West. Francois and Isadore made their home in New Mexico, maintaining a close relationship with Joseph in Missouri. Though frequently under contract by others, the brothers did their best work when allowed to freelance and make their own rules. The brothers would ultimately pass on their prosperous legacy of ranging, exploring, trading, and town-building to a new generation of settlers. As the nature of the fur trade changed, so did the brothers’ business model. They began focusing on outfitting western migrants, town folk, and farmers. Their practices made each of them wealthy; however, they all died poor. To understand the opening of the American West, one must first know about men like the brothers Robidoux. Their lives are the framework for stories about the American frontier. By using primary sources located at the Missouri Historical Society, the Mexican Archives of New Mexico, and the Huntington Library, as well as contemporary accounts written by those who knew them, Willoughby has now told the Robidouxs’ story.
Download or read book The Great Heart of the Republic written by Adam Arenson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-03 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the battles to determine the destiny of the United States in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, St. Louis, then at the hinge between North, South, and West, was ideally placed to bring these sections together. At least, this was the hope of a coterie of influential St. Louisans. But their visions of re-orienting the nation's politics with Westerners at the top and St. Louis as a cultural, commercial, and national capital crashed as the country was tom apart by convulsions over slavery, emancipation, and Manifest Destiny. While standard accounts frame the coming of the Civil War as strictly a conflict between the North and the South who were competing to expand their way of life, Arenson shifts the focus to the distinctive culture and politics of the American West, recovering the region’s importance for understanding the Civil War and examining the vision of western advocates themselves, and the importance of their distinct agenda for shaping the political, economic, and cultural future of the nation.
Download or read book Mrs Dred Scott written by Lea VanderVelde and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In telling the life of Harriet, Dred's wife and co-litigant in the case, this book provides a compensatory history to the generations of work that missed key sources only recently brought to light. Moreover, it gives insight into the reasons and ways that slaves used the courts to establish their freedom. --from publisher description.
Download or read book The Clamorgans written by Julie Winch and published by Hill and Wang. This book was released on 2011-05-24 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Damning, Absurd, and Revelatory History of Race in America Told through the History of a Single Family Historian Julie Winch uses her sweeping, multigenerational history of the unforgettable Clamorgans to chronicle how one family navigated race in America from the 1780s through the 1950s. What she discovers overturns decades of received academic wisdom. Far from an impermeable wall fixed by whites, race opened up a moral gray zone that enterprising blacks manipulated to whatever advantage they could obtain. The Clamorgan clan traces to the family patriarch Jacques Clamorgan, a French adventurer of questionable ethics who bought up, or at least claimed to have bought up, huge tracts of land around St. Louis. On his death, he bequeathed his holdings to his mixed-race, illegitimate heirs, setting off nearly two centuries of litigation. The result is a window on a remarkable family that by the early twentieth century variously claimed to be black, Creole, French, Spanish, Brazilian, Jewish, and white. The Clamorgans is a remarkable counterpoint to the central claim of whiteness studies, namely that race as a social construct was manipulated by whites to justify discrimination. Winch finds in the Clamorgans generations upon generations of men and women who studiously negotiated the very fluid notion of race to further their own interests. Winch's remarkable achievement is to capture in the vivid lives of this unforgettable family the degree to which race was open to manipulation by Americans on both sides of the racial divide.
Download or read book French Fur Traders and Voyageurs in the American West written by LeRoy Reuben Hafen and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ?Frenchmen were far ahead of Englishmen in the early Far West, not only prior in time but greater in numbers and in historical importance,? writes Janet Lecompte in her introduction to French Fur Traders and Voyageurs in the American West. They were the first to navigate the Mississippi and its tributaries, and they founded St. Louis and New Orleans. Though France lost her North American possessions in 1763, thousands of her natives remained on the continent. Many of them were voyageurs for Hudson?s Bay Company, whose descendants would join American fur trade companies plying the trans-Mississippi West. ø This volume documents the fact that in the nineteenth century Frenchmen dominated the fur trade in the United States. Twenty-two biographies, collected from LeRoy R. Hafen?s classic ten-volume The Mountain Men and the Fur Trade of the Far West, represent a variety of origins and social classes, types of work, and trading areas. Here are trappers who joined John Jacob Astor?s ill-fated fur venture on the Pacific, St. Louis traders who hauled goods to Spanish New Mexico along the Santa Fe Trail, and those who traded with Indians in the western plains and mountains.
Download or read book Immigrant Women in the Settlement of Missouri written by Robyn Burnett and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2005-06-08 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robyn Burnett and Ken Luebbering first looked at how immigration has affected Missouri’s cultural landscape in their popular book German Settlement in Missouri: New Land, Old Ways. Now they tell the stories of women from all across Europe who left the Old World for Missouri. Drawing heavily on the women’s own stories, Immigrant Women in the Settlement of Missouri illustrates common elements of their lives without minimizing the diversity and complexity of each individual’s experience. The book begins with descriptions culled from diaries, letters, and memoirs documenting preparations for the journey, the perilous Atlantic crossing, and the sometimes equally long and arduous trip from the port of entry to Missouri. Burnett and Luebbering go on to examine how women, once in Missouri, coped with the problems of daily life in an unfamiliar and occasionally hostile environment. Whether it was the hardships of the frontier, the harsh realities of urban life, childbirth, the deaths of family members, isolation, or prejudice, their new lives brought numerous challenges. Many found success and contentment, as well, and the book also documents their joys and triumphs: physical survival, economic prosperity, thriving families, friendships, and community celebrations. Because it examines the lives of women from many social classes and ethnic backgrounds, Immigrant Women in the Settlement of Missouri does much to explain the rich cultural diversity Missouri enjoys today. The photographs and narratives relating to Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, and Polish life will remind descendants of immigrants that many customs and traditions they grew up practicing have roots in their home countries and will also promote understanding of the customs of other cultures. In addition to the ethnic and class differences that affected these women’s lives, the book also notes the impact of the various eras in which they lived, their education, the circumstances of their migrations, and their destinations across Missouri. With their engaging and straightforward narrative, Burnett and Luebbering take the reader chronologically through the history of the state from the colonial period to the Civil War and industrialization. Like all Missouri Heritage Readers, this one is presented in an accessible format with abundant illustrations, and it is sure to please both general readers and those engaged in immigrant and women’s studies.
Download or read book The Osage written by Willard H. Rollings and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Osage Indians were a powerful group of Native Americans who lived along the prairies and plains of present-day Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. The Osage: An Ethnohistorical Study of Hegemony on the Prairie-Plains, now available in paper, shows how the Osage formed and maintained political, economic, and social control over a large portion of the central United States for more than 150 years.
Download or read book Being Good written by Martha Saxton and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2003 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pathbreaking new study of women and morality How do people decide what is "good" and what is "bad"? How does a society set moral guidelines -- and what happens when the behavior of various groups differs from these guidelines? Martha Saxton tackles these and other fascinating issues in Being Good, her history of the moral values prescribed for women in early America. Saxton begins by examining seventeenth-century Boston, then moves on to eighteenth-century Virginia and nineteenth-century St. Louis. Studying women throughout the life cycle -- girls, young unmarried women, young wives and mothers, older widows -- through their diaries and personal papers, she also studies the variations due to different ethnicities and backgrounds. In all three cases, she is able to show how the values of one group conflicted with or developed in opposition to those of another. And, as the women's testimonies make clear, the emotional styles associated with different value systems varied. A history of American women's moral life thus gives us a history of women's emotional life as well. In lively and penetrating prose, Saxton argues that women's morals changed from the days of early colonization to the days of westward expansion, as women became at once less confined and less revered by their men -- and explores how these changes both reflected and affected trends in the nation at large.
Download or read book Osage Women and Empire written by Tai Edwards and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2018-05-07 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Osage empire, as most histories claim, was built by Osage men’s prowess at hunting and war. But, as Tai S. Edwards observes in Osage Women and Empire, Osage cosmology defined men and women as necessary pairs; in their society, hunting and war, like everything else, involved both men and women. Only by studying the gender roles of both can we hope to understand the rise and fall of the Osage empire. In Osage Women and Empire, Edwards brings gender construction to the fore in the context of Osage history through the nineteenth century. Edwards’s examination of the Osage gender construction reveals that the rise of their empire did not result in an elevation of men’s status and a corresponding reduction in women’s. Consulting a wealth of sources, both Osage and otherwise—ethnographies, government documents, missionary records, traveler narratives—Edwards considers how the first century and a half of colonization affected Osage gender construction. She shows how women and men built the Osage empire together. Once confronted with US settler colonialism, Osage men and women increasingly focused on hunting and trade to protect their culture, and their traditional social structures—including their system of gender complementarity—endured. Gender in fact functioned to maintain societal order and served as a central site for experiencing, adapting to, and resisting the monumental change brought on by colonization. Through the lens of gender, and by drawing on the insights of archaeology, ethnography, linguistics, and oral history, Osage Women and Empire presents a new, more nuanced picture of the critical role of men and women in the period when the Osage rose to power in the western Mississippi Valley and when that power later declined on their Kansas reservation.
Download or read book By Honor and Right written by John C. Jackson and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2011-03 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jackson reconstructs the life and astonishing audacity of Captain John McClallen, the first United States officer to follow the Lewis and Clark Expedition. He offers an engrossing read for devotees of American Western history as well as mystery lovers.
