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3 books match the query 'Cleary, Patricia'

cover of Elizabeth Murray: A Woman's Pursuit of Independence in Eighteenth-Century America

Elizabeth Murray

A Woman's Pursuit of Independence in Eighteenth-Century America

Patricia Cleary

University of Massachusetts Press, 2000

One of the most compelling figures in colonial America, Elizabeth Murray (1726–1785) was a Scottish immigrant who settled in Boston in her early twenties and took up shopkeeping. For many years, she practiced her trade successfully while marrying three times, once to a much older man who left her an extremely rich widow. This biography chronicles the life of this extraordinary “ordinary” woman who tried to make a place for herself and other women in the world by asserting her own independence inside and outside of the home. 

As an importer and retailer of British goods, Murray conducted business with merchants and manufacturers in England and buyers in the American colonies, even traveling to London to select her own stock. Deeply satisfied by her work and the economic freedom it brought her, she acted as mentor to other women, helping them to establish shops of their own. She also protected her autonomy by demanding prenuptial agreements from her second and third husbands that gave her a measure of control over her property that was rare for a married woman of her day. 

The spirit of independence that Murray so valued in herself and nurtured in other women was severely tested by the upheavals of the American Revolution. With strong loyalties to both Britain and America, she was torn by the conflict, especially when close relatives chose opposing sides and her third husband abandoned her, leaving her to defend the family estate alone. Her wartime experiences—wild midnight rides, accusations of being a spy, quartering both royal and rebel troops, and brief imprisonment—vividly capture the turmoil of the Revolution and highlight the range of her political commitments.

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cover of Mound City: The Place of the Indigenous Past and Present in St. Louis

Mound City

The Place of the Indigenous Past and Present in St. Louis

Patricia Cleary

University of Missouri Press, 2025

Winner of the 2025 Midland Authors Award in the History category 

Nearly one thousand years ago, Native peoples built a satellite suburb of America's great metropolis on the site that later became St. Louis. At its height, as many as 30,000 people lived in and around present-day Cahokia, Illinois. While the mounds around Cahokia survive today (as part of a state historic site and UNESCO world heritage site), the monumental earthworks that stood on the western shore of the Mississippi were razed in the 1800s. But before and after they fell, the mounds held an important place in St. Louis history, earning it the nickname “Mound City.” For decades, the city had an Indigenous reputation. Tourists came to marvel at the mounds and to see tribal delegations in town for trade and diplomacy. As the city grew, St. Louisans repurposed the mounds—for a reservoir, a restaurant, and railroad landfill—in the process destroying cultural artifacts and sacred burial sites. Despite evidence to the contrary, some white Americans declared the mounds natural features, not built ones, and cheered their leveling. Others espoused far-fetched theories about a lost race of Mound Builders killed by the ancestors of contemporary tribes. Ignoring Indigenous people's connections to the mounds, white Americans positioned themselves as the legitimate inheritors of the land and asserted that modern Native peoples were destined to vanish. Such views underpinned coerced treaties and forced removals, and—when Indigenous peoples resisted—military action. The idea of the “Vanishing Indian” also fueled the erasure of Indigenous peoples’ histories, a practice that continued in the 1900s in civic celebrations that featured white St. Louisans “playing Indian” and heritage groups claiming the mounds as part of their own history. Yet Native peoples endured and in recent years, have successfully begun to reclaim the sole monumental mound remaining within city limits.

Drawing on a wide range of sources, Patricia Cleary explores the layers of St. Louis’s Indigenous history. Along with the first in-depth overview of the life, death, and afterlife of the mounds, Mound City offers a gripping account of how Indigenous histories have shaped the city’s growth, landscape, and civic culture.

 
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cover of The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: A History of Colonial St. Louis

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil

A History of Colonial St. Louis

Patricia Cleary

University of Missouri Press, 2018

As Anglo-American colonists along the Atlantic seaboard began to protest British rule in the 1760s, a new settlement was emerging many miles west. St. Louis, founded simply as a French trading post, was expanding into a diverse global village. Few communities in eighteenth-century North America had such a varied population: indigenous Americans, French traders and farmers, African and Indian slaves, British officials, and immigrant explorers interacted there under the weak guidance of the Spanish governors. As the city’s significance as a hub of commerce grew, its populace became increasingly unpredictable, feuding over matters large and small and succumbing too often to the temptations of “the world, the flesh, and the devil.” But British leaders and American Revolutionaries still sought to acquire the area, linking St. Louis to the era’s international political and economic developments and placing this young community at the crossroads of empire.
With its colonial period too often glossed over in histories of both early America and the city itself, St. Louis merits a new treatment. The first modern book devoted exclusively to the history of colonial St. Louis, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil illuminates how its people loved, fought, worshipped, and traded. Covering the years from the settlement’s 1764 founding to its 1804 absorption into the young United States, this study reflects on the experiences of the village’s many inhabitants.
The World, the Flesh, and the Devil recounts important, neglected episodes in the early history of St. Louis in a narrative drawn from original documentary records. Chapters detail the official censure of the illicit union at the heart of St. Louis’s founding family, the 1780 battle that nearly destroyed the village, Spanish efforts to manage commercial relations between Indian peoples and French traders, and the ways colonial St. Louisans tested authority and thwarted traditional norms. Patricia Cleary argues that St. Louis residents possessed a remarkable willingness to adapt and innovate, which enabled them to survive the many challenges they faced.
The interior regions of the U.S. have been largely relegated to the margins of colonial American history, even though their early times were just as dynamic and significant as those that occurred back east. The World, the Flesh, and the Devil is an inclusive, wide-ranging, and overdue account of the Gateway city’s earliest years, and this engaging book contributes to a comprehensive national history by revealing the untold stories of Upper Louisiana’s capital.
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