Paris, Tightwad, Peculiar, Neosho, Gasconade, Hannibal, Diamond, Quarantine, Zif, and Zig. These are just a few of the names Margot Ford McMillen covers in her lively book on the history of place names in Missouri. The origins behind the names range from humorous to descriptive:
•Tightwad, Missouri, is said to have been named after a store owner who cheated a mailman out of his rightful watermelon to make an extra fifty cents. •Plad, Missouri, was supposed to be named "Glad," but the post office printed the name wrong, and it was too much trouble to get it changed. •Some place names describe a location, such as Big Spring or Flat River. •Other names show the influence of immigrants to the state, like Hermann, which is a German name, or the Maries River, which was derived from the French. •Many places are named for people or wildlife found nearby, while others are backed up by legend or simply picked out of thin air.The Missouria people were the first American Indians encountered by European explorers venturing up the Pekitanoui River—the waterway we know as the Missouri. This Indian nation called itself the Nyut^achi, which translates to “People of the River Mouth,” and had been a dominant force in the Louisiana Territory of the pre-colonial era. When first described by the Europeans in 1673, they numbered in the thousands. But by 1804, when William Clark referred to them as “once the most powerful nation on the Missouri River,” fewer than 400 Missouria remained. The state and Missouri River are namesakes of these historic Indians, but little of the tribe’s history is known today. Michael Dickey tells the story of these indigenous Americans in The People of the River’s Mouth.
Images on rocks depicting birds, serpents, deer, and other designs are haunting reminders of prehistoric peoples. This book documents Missouri's rich array of petroglyphs and pictographs, analyzing the many aspects of these rock carvings and paintings to show how such representations of ritual activities can enhance our understanding of Native American culture.
Missouri is a particularly important site for rock art because it straddles the Plains, the Ozarks, and the Southeast. Carol Diaz-Granados and James Duncan have established a model for analyzing this rock art as archaeological data and have mapped the patterning of fifty-eight major motifs across the state. Of particular importance is their analysis of motifs from Mississippi River Valley sites, including Cahokia.The authors include interpretive discussions on iconography and ideology, drawing on years of research in the ethnographic records and literature of Native Americans linguistically related to earlier peoples. Their distribution maps show how motifs provide clues to patterns of movement among prehistoric peoples and to the range of belief systems. Rock art is an aspect of the archaeological record that has received little attention, and the art is particularly subject to the ravages of time. By documenting these fragile images, this book makes a major contribution to rock art research in North America.
Beginning with the French villages on the Mississippi River, Marshall leads us chronologically through the settlement of the state and how these communities established our cultural heritage. Other core populations include the “Old Stock Americans” (primarily Scotch-Irish from Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia), African Americans, German-speaking immigrants, people with American Indian ancestry (focusing on Cherokee families dating from the Trail of Tears in the 1830s), and Irish railroad workers in the post–Civil War period. These are the primary communities whose fiddle and dance traditions came together on the Missouri frontier to cultivate the bounty of old-time fiddling enjoyed today.
When is a cookbook more than just a cookbook? When it’s a gateway to our culinary heritage. For well over a hundred years, Missouri’s cookbooks have helped readers serve up tasty dishes to the state’s tables, but these publications also document the evolution of our kitchens and households.
Pot Roast,Politics, and Ants in the Pantry, a treasure trove of anecdotes and nuggets of historical information about cookery in the Show-Me State, draws from more than 150 publications to reveal Missouri’s cookbook heritage and to deliver a generous sampling of recipes. Carol Fisher and John Fisher look back to manuscript cookbooks from 1821 St. Louis, then progress through the years and around Missouri before arriving at today’s online recipes. Along the way, they dish out servings of kitchen medicine, household hints, and cookbook literature gleaned from the state’s cache of culinary gems.
From handwritten family recipe collections and mimeographed publications to glossy color editions, the texts the Fishers have obtained from libraries and historical societies as well as their own extensive cookbook collection include such curiosities as the Julia Clark Household Memoranda Book from the William Clark papers, an 1880 production by the Ladies of St. Louis called My Mother’s Cookbook, Mary Foote Henderson’s Practical Cooking and Dinner Giving, and Albert E. Brumley’s All-Day Singin’ and Dinner on the Ground. They tell how various ethnic communities raised money by creating cookbooks, how the state’s Beef Council and Pork Association put recipes on the Internet, and how restaurants like the Blue Owl in Kimmswick and Stephenson’s Apple Farm Restaurant near Kansas City enhanced their reputations with their own cookbooks. Festival cookbooks, company cookbooks, even cookbooks tied to world events—they’re all here in one delightful book.
In this vastly entertaining review, readers will learn where to find recipes for dandelion wine, mock turtle soup (requiring a large calf’s head split open by the butcher), and vinegar pie—as well as the curative properties of potato water, tips for raising chickens in the basement, and even “how to cook a husband.” An extensive bibliography includes information to help readers track down the books discussed and also those on their own wish lists.
Pot Roast, Politics, and Ants in the Pantry: Missouri’s Cookbook Heritage shows how, instead of being just collections of recipes, cookbooks provide history lessons, document changing food ways, and demonstrate the cultural diversity of the state. From Julia Clark’s simple frontier recipes for puddings and preserves to Irma Rombauer’s encyclopedic Joy of Cooking—originally self-published in Missouri—Carol Fisher and John Fisher have laid out a smorgasbord of reading pleasure for cookbook collectors, nostalgia buffs, and gourmands alike.
In the fall of 1861, fifty-one-year-old Rev. Francis Springer enlisted in the Union army. The following spring, Springer, a friend and one-time neighbor to Abraham Lincoln, rode away with the 10th Illinois Cavalry. A witness to the Battle of Prairie Grove (December 1862), Springer was later named post chaplain at Fort Smith, where, in additon to preaching and ministering to the troops, he was placed in charge of refugees—widows, orphans, and contrabands—the displaced victims of virulent guerrilla warfare in Northwest Arkansas. Springer also wrote articles and columns in the Fort Smith New Era under the pseudonym, “Thrifton.” Springer’s honest appraisals of life in the Army of the Frontier make for fascinating reading, and his unique perspective as moralist, educator, and journalist provide new insight into the Civil War and how it was fought in the West. The book includes several never-before published photographs and appendixes which feature accounts of six military executions that Springer participated in as a Union Army chaplain, the hitherto unpublished last letters home of two rebel soldiers condemned and executed at Fort Smith, as well as a eulogy for Abraham Lincoln.
The Preacher’s Tale includes several never before published photographs, and appendixes that contain accounts of six military executions that Springer participated in as a Union Army chaplain, the last letters home of two rebel soldiers condemned and executed at Fort Smith, as well as a eulogy written for Abraham Lincoln.
Over the past century, three nationally significant histories have vied for space and place in Independence, Missouri. Independence was declared Zion by Joseph Smith, served as a gathering and provisioning point for trails west, and was called home by President Harry S. Truman for sixty-four years. Historian Jon E. Taylor has integrated research from newspapers, public documents, oral histories, and private papers to detail how the community has preserved and remembered these various legacies.
Truman’s legacy would appear to have been secured in Independence via three significant designations—his presidential library opened there in 1957, his neighborhood was designated a national historic landmark in 1972, and his home was declared a national historic site in 1982. However, Taylor argues that Truman’s seeming dominance in the community’s memory is in fact endangered by competition from the other aspects of the town’s historical heritage.
Taylor considers the role Mormon history has played in the city's history and chronicles how the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints returned to Independence to fulfill Joseph Smith's dream of creating Zion in the city, a situation that impacted neighborhoods near the Truman home. Taylor also examines the city's fascination with the Santa Fe, Oregon, and California trails, detailing how that history was lost and remembered and is now immortalized on the Independence square and in the National Frontier Trails Museum.
In the 1980s, the city council reduced the size of the Truman Heritage District, created to maintain Truman’s association with his neighborhood, after church opposition. At the same time, city officials pushed to make Independence a major tourist destination, a move largely dependent upon the city capitalizing on its association with Truman. These inconsistent policies and incongruous goals have led to innumerable changes in the landscape Truman enjoyed during his legendary morning walks.
A President, a Church, and Trails West chronicles one city’s struggle to preserve its history and the built environment. Taylor places the role of preservation in Independence not only within the larger context of preservation in the United States but also within the context of American environmental history. This volume is sure to appeal to anyone interested in public history, historic preservation, history and memory, and local history.
When a murder takes place in Dawson’s Landing, Missouri, the lives of twin Italian noblemen, the courageous slave Roxy, her 1/32nd “black” son who has been raised “white,” and a failing lawyer with an intense interest in the science of fingerprinting become tangled. The unsolved riddle at the heart of Pudd’nhead Wilson is less the identity of the murderer than it is the question of whether nature or nurture makes the man.
In his introduction, Werner Sollors illuminates the complex web of uncertainty that is the switched-and-doubled-identity world of Mark Twain’s novel. This edition follows the text of the 1899 De Luxe edition and for the first time reprints all the E. W. Kemble illustrations that accompanied it.
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