front cover of Immigrant Women in the Settlement of Missouri
Immigrant Women in the Settlement of Missouri
Robyn Burnett & Ken Luebbering
University of Missouri Press, 2005
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.
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Independent Immigrants
A Settlement of Hanoverian Germans in Western Missouri
Robert W. Frizzell
University of Missouri Press

Between 1838 and the early 1890s, German peasant farmers from the Kingdom of Hanover made their way to Lafayette County, Missouri, to form a new community centered on the town of Concordia. Their story has much to tell us about the American immigrant experience—and about how newcomers were caught up in the violence that swept through their adoptive home.

Robert Frizzell grew up near Concordia, and in this first book-length history of the German settlement, he chronicles its life and times during those formative years. Founded by Hanoverian Friedrich Dierking—known as “Dierking the Comforter” for the aid he gave his countrymen—the Concordia settlement blossomed from 72 households in 1850 to 375 over the course of twenty years. Frizzell traces that growth as he examines the success of early agricultural efforts, but he also tells how the community strayed from the cultural path set by its freethinker founder to become a center of religious conservatism.

Drawing on archival material from both sides of the Atlantic, Frizzell offers a compelling account for scholars and general readers alike, showing how Concordia differed from other German immigrant communities in America. He also explores the conditions in Hanover—particularly the village of Esperke, from which many of the settlers hailed—that caused people to leave, shedding new light on theological, political, and economic circumstances in both the Old World and the New.

When the Civil War came, the antislavery Hanoverians found themselves in the Missouri county with the greatest number of slaves, and the Germans supported the Union while most of their neighbors sympathized with Confederate guerrillas. Frizzell tells how the notorious “Bloody Bill” Anderson attacked the community three times, committing atrocities as gruesome as any recorded in the state—then how the community flourished after the war and even bought out the farmsteads of former slaveholders.

Frizzell’s account challenges many historians’ assumptions about German motives for immigration and includes portraits of families and individuals that show the high price in toil and blood required to meet the challenges of making a home in a new land. Independent Immigrants reveals the untold story of these newcomers as it reveals a little-known aspect of the Civil War in Missouri.

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Indians and Archaeology of Missouri, Revised Edition
Carl H. Chapman & Eleanor F. Chapman
University of Missouri Press, 1983

This expanded edition of Indians and Archaeology of Missouri gives an excellent introduction to the cultural development of Missouri’s Indians during the past twelve thousand years. Providing a new chapter on the Hunter Foragers of the Dalton period and substantial revision of other chapters to incorporate recent discoveries, the Chapmans present knowledge based upon decades of experience with archaeological excavations in an understandable and fascinating form.

The first edition of Indians and Archaeology of Missouri has been recognized in Missouri and nationally as one of the best books of its kind. The Missouri Historical Review called it “simply indispensable.” The Plains Anthropologist added similar praise: “Clearly written and exceptionally well illustrated…it is the answer to the amateur’s prayers.” Archaeology described it as “a boon to Missouri’s many amateur archaeologists, a useful source of information for professionals and interesting reading for the layman.”

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Indigenous Missourians
Ancient Societies to the Present
Greg Olson
University of Missouri Press, 2023
The history of Indigenous people in present-day Missouri is far more nuanced, complex, and vibrant than the often-told tragic stories of conflict with white settlers and forced Indian removal would lead us to believe. In this path-breaking narrative, Greg Olson presents the Show Me State’s Indigenous past as one span­ning twelve millennia of Native presence, resilience, and evolu­tion. While previous Missouri histories have tended to include Indigenous people only during periods when they constituted a threat to the state’s white settlement, Olson shows us the con­tinuous presence of Native people that includes the present day.

Beginning thousands of years before the state of Missouri exist­ed, Olson recounts how centuries of inventiveness and adapt­ability enabled Native people to create innovations in pottery, agriculture, architecture, weaponry, and intertribal diplomacy. Olson also shows how the resilience of Indigenous people like the Osages allowed them to thrive as fur traders, even as settler colonialists waged an all-out policy of cultural genocide against them.

Though the state of Missouri claimed to have forced Indigenous people from its borders after the 1830s, Olson uses U.S. Census records and government rolls from the allotment period to show that thousands remained. In the end, he argues that, with a cur­rent population of 27,000 Indigenous people, Missouri remains very much a part of Indian Country, and that Indigenous history is Missouri history.
 
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The Indomitable Mary Easton Sibley
Pioneer of Women's Education in Missouri
Kristie C. Wolferman
University of Missouri Press, 2008
Acknowledged as a significant figure in the history of women on the early western frontier, Mary Easton Sibley may be little known to many modern readers. Yet she was involved in most of the important events in nineteenth-century Missouri, pursued and practiced educational innovations, and founded a school that continues to thrive today. This first biography of Sibley sheds new light on this important pioneer.
            Kristie Wolferman retraces the course of an exciting life, beginning with four-year-old Mary’s arrival in St. Louis in 1804 when her father was appointed attorney general for the District of Louisiana—and the Eastons became one of the first American families to settle in this bustling French town. At fifteen, Mary married George Champlin Sibley, the factor of Fort Osage in Western Missouri, where the young bride lived among the Indians on the edge of the frontier and took up her teaching vocation. She then went on to found Linden Wood in St. Charles, the first college for women west of the Mississippi, and she also taught classes for African American and immigrant children. Throughout the story, Wolferman shows us a life intimately entwined with the history of the state, as Mary witnessed St. Louis in its primitive years and frontier life at Fort Osage, as well as changes in Indian policy and citizenship for former slaves.
Although Sibley’s life has been told in older accounts, Wolferman’s is the first to draw fully on Mary and George Sibley’s journals and letters, with Mary’s journal especially shedding light on her views regarding women’s social and political roles, slavery, temperance, religion, and other topics. By reconstructing Sibley’s inner life as well as her career, Wolferman depicts not merely a frontier heroine and educational pioneer but an assertive woman who did not hesitate to express unconventional views.
            Today, Lindenwood University is a major coeducational institution that continues to honor Mary Sibley’s philosophy and dedication. This biography not only brings to life one of Missouri’s most remarkable women educators but also demonstrates how her story reflects educational, religious, and social developments in both the state and the nation. The Indomitable Mary Easton Sibley recognizes her as a key player on the frontier and as a major part of Missouri’s heritage.
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Insane Sisters
Or, the Price Paid for Challenging a Company Town
Gregg Andrews
University of Missouri Press, 2020

Insane Sisters is the extraordinary tale of two sisters, Mary Alice Heinbach and Euphemia B. Koller, and their seventeen- year property dispute against the nation's leading cement corporation—the Atlas Portland Cement Company.

In 1903, Atlas built a plant on the border of the small community of Ilasco, located just outside Hannibal—home of the infamous cave popularized in Mark Twain's most acclaimed novels. The rich and powerful Atlas quickly appointed itself as caretaker of Twain's heritage and sought to take control of Ilasco. However, its authority was challenged in 1910 when Heinbach inherited her husband's tract of land that formed much of the unincorporated town site. On grounds that Heinbach's husband had been in the advanced stages of alcoholism when she married him the year before, some of Ilasco's political leaders and others who had ties to Atlas challenged the will, charging Heinbach with undue influence.

To help fight against the local lawyers and politicians who wanted Atlas to own the land, Heinbach enlisted the help of her shrewd and combative sister, Euphemia Koller, by making her co-owner of the tract. In a complex case that went to the Missouri Supreme Court four times, the sisters fiercely sought to hang on to the tract. However, in 1921 the county probate court imposed a guardianship over Heinbach and a circuit judge ordered a sheriff's sale of the property. After Atlas purchased the tract, Koller waged a lonely battle to overturn the sale and expose the political conspiracies that had led to Ilasco's conversion into a company town. Her efforts ultimately resulted in her court- ordered confinement in 1927 to Missouri's State Hospital Number One for the Insane, where she remained until her death at age sixty-eight.

Insane Sisters traces the dire consequences the sisters suffered and provides a fascinating look at how the intersection of gender, class, and law shaped the history and politics of Ilasco. The book also sheds valuable new light on the wider consolidation of corporate capitalism and the use of guardianships and insanity to punish unconventional women in the early twentieth century.

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Into the Spotlight
Four Missouri Women
Margot Ford McMillen & Heather Roberson
University of Missouri Press, 2004
As a companion volume to their earlier book, Called to Courage: Four Women in Missouri History, Margot Ford McMillen and Heather Roberson’s Into the Spotlight provides the biographies of four more remarkable Missouri women. Although these women came from radically different circumstances, they all shared a common sense of purpose, determination, and courage, and each used her own unique position to empower herself and others

Sacred Sun, also called Mohongo, was a Native American of the Osage tribe in Missouri. In 1827, her people lost their land, their sacred places, and many of their traditions. Seeking answers to the dilemma faced by her people, and possibly aid from the French, she journeyed to Europe with a group of prominent Osage and a French entrepreneur. The harrowing events she experienced there would shape the woman she became when she returned to the Osage tribe, which had been forced to move to Oklahoma and was still struggling to survive.

Emily Newell Blair was born into a successful southwest Missouri family. Although she was born at a time when the contributions of women in the workforce were quite limited, she was encouraged by her family to get an education and expand her skills in writing and speaking. When women did begin to pursue education and careers, Blair was at the forefront, working tirelessly to secure voting rights for women. Eventually, she was elected to the Democratic National Committee and later poured her energy into organizing Democratic women’s clubs.

Josephine Baker grew up in segregated turn-of-the-century St. Louis society, which determined human worth by the color of one’s skin. Her mixed ethnic background left Baker feeling isolated both from her own black family and from white society. Driven to develop her own unique style, she became a star of song and stage, toured Europe, served as a spy, and was a fervent civil rights and antiracism activist.

Elizabeth Virginia Wallace, known to her family as “Bess,” grew up in one of Missouri’s most prominent families. She married a neighborhood boy—considered unacceptable by her mother—who would go on to become President Harry Truman. Bess Truman, called “the boss” by her husband, worked side by side with him, editing his speeches and providing advice and guidance through innumerable crises during and after World War II.

Into the Spotlight provides valuable new insights into Missouri and American history, as well as women’s history, and will be a welcome addition to the Missouri Heritage Readers Series.
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front cover of The Invincible Duff Green
The Invincible Duff Green
Whig of the West
W. Stephen Belko
University of Missouri Press, 2006
He made a name for himself in the Missouri territory as a land speculator, entrepreneur, lawyer, militia officer, politician, and newspaper editor. He went on to take part in many of the events that shaped the young republic, and his name became a household word. But Duff Green has not found his rightful place in history—until now. W. Stephen Belko has written the first full-scale political investigation of this important figure, examining Green’s fundamental role in the politics, society, and economy of Jacksonian America.
Duff Green emerged on the national stage when he became editor of the United States Telegraph, an organizer of the fledgling Democratic Party, and one of Andrew Jackson’s chief advisers. He broke bitterly with Jackson over his feud with Vice President John C. Calhoun, then later found a place as a diplomat in John Tyler’s administration and emerged as a key figure in the popularization of Manifest Destiny and the annexation of Texas. Green also played a major role in the transportation revolution as a developer of canal and railroad projects.
Belko presents a balanced appraisal of Green’s career, particularly from 1815 to 1850, delving into his personality to tease out the motivations for his pursuit of such wide-ranging ventures. Drawing on a wealth of previously unexploited primary sources, he not only chronicles Green’s labyrinthine career but also illuminates Green’s rise in the Democratic Party; his role in the creation and development of the Whig Party; and his considerable influence on national debates regarding slavery, nullification, the National Bank, territorial expansion, and foreign relations.
For all his influence, Green has until now been either ignored or portrayed as a Calhoun minion and proslavery sectionalist in the Fireater mold. Belko revises these assessments of Green’s role in the making of Jacksonian America, showing him to be an independent westerner who was politically moderate—even less fanatical on the slavery issue than many have supposed. Belko’s research uncovers a Duff Green who was an aggressive and buoyant person, to be sure, but a democratic man of principle who is rightly called a quintessential Jacksonian.
The story of Jacksonian America cannot be fully told without Duff Green. This long-awaited study is a compelling narrative for scholars and aficionados of political or Missouri history, offering a fresh view of his crucial contributions to the antebellum era and shedding new light on the true nature of Jacksonian democracy.
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The Ioway in Missouri
Greg Olson
University of Missouri Press, 2008
Although their ancestors came from the Great Lakes region and they now live in several midwestern states, the Ioway (Baxoje) people claim a rich history in Missouri dating back to the eighteenth century. Living alongside white settlers while retaining their traditional way of life, the tribe eventually had to make difficult choices in order to survive—choices that included unlikely alliances, resistance, and even violence.
This is the first book on the Ioway to appear in thirty years and the first to focus on their role in Missouri’s colonial and early statehood periods. Greg Olson tells how the Ioway were attracted to the rich land between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers as a place in which they could peacefully reside. But it was here that they ended up facing the greatest challenges to their survival as a people, with leaders like White Cloud and Great Walker rising to meet those demands.
Olson draws on interviews with contemporary tribal members to convey an understanding of Ioway beliefs, practices, and history, and he incorporates reports of Indian agents and speeches of past Ioway leaders to illuminate the changes that took place in the tribe’s traditional ways of life. He tells of their oral traditions and creation stories, their farming and hunting practices, and their alliances with neighboring Indians, incoming settlers, and the U.S. government. In describing these alliances, he shows that the Ioway did not always agree among themselves on the direction they should take as they navigated the crosscurrents of a changing world, and that the attempts of some Ioway leaders to adapt to white society did not prevent the tribe’s descent into poverty and despair or their ultimate removal from their lands.
As modern Ioway in Kansas and Oklahoma work to recover the history of their people—and as local historians recognize their important place in Missouri history—Olson’s book offers a balanced account of the profound effects on the Ioway of other tribes, explorers, and settlers who began to move into their homelands after the Louisiana Purchase. Written for a general audience, it is a useful, accessible introduction to the changing fortunes of the Ioway people in the era of exploration, colonialism, and early statehood.
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An Irish-American Odyssey
The Remarkable Rise of the O'Shaughnessy Brothers
Colum Kenny
University of Missouri Press, 2014
The O’Shaughnessy brothers’ story takes place between 1860 and 1950 in Illinois, Missouri, New York, and Ireland. They were the children of an impoverished immigrant who fled the famine in Ireland and his Irish-American wife.An Irish-American Odysseyis the tale of this first-generation immigrant family’s struggle to assimilate into American society, highlighting their perseverance and determination to seize opportunities and surmount obstacles, all the while establishing a legacy for their own descendants in American art, advertising, journalism, and public service.
TIME magazine called James O’Shaughnessy “the best in the business” of advertising, and he became the first chief executive of the American Association of Advertising Agencies. Earlier, he was a “star” reporter at the Chicago Tribune, and James and Francis were centrally involved in founding and maintaining the Irish Fellowship Club. Francis was also the first graduate of the University of Notre Dame to be invited to deliver its annual commencement address, while Martin was the first captain of Notre Dame’s official basketball team. An attorney, John represented the alleged victim in a notorious “white slavery” case. Thomas (“Gus”) became the leading Gaelic Revival artist in America as well as a promoter of Italian-American heritage, campaigning successfully to have Columbus Day enacted a public holiday.
The remarkable rise of the O’Shaughnessy brothers proves the American dream is attainable.
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