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In November 1933, when Luther Ely Smith returned to St. Louis from visiting the George Rogers Clark Memorial, which he helped build in Vincennes, Indiana, he appraised his adopted city’s riverfront. From near this site, William Clark and the Corps of Discovery co-leader Merriweather Lewis embarked in 1804 on their overland expedition to the Pacific …
The St. Louis Arch
Stars and stripes, eagle and laurels—patriotism, federalism, strength, and peace; each of these symbols and values represented on the seal of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Missouri, spoke to the mission of the system as a whole. The first central banking institution allowed to open in the United States since Andrew Jackson’s disastrous …
The Two Federal Reserve Banks of Missouri
When employees of the St. Louis Transit Company voted to strike on May 8, 1900, the effect was to severely crush the city’s primary public transportation system for several months. Similarly, in December 1918, 2,800 employees of the Kansas City Railways, in demand for higher wages, walked off the job and temporarily shut down the …
Missouri Trolleys and Streetcars
Union Station currently sits as the centerpiece of the Kansas City skyline. Thousands of visitors from across the metropolitan area and country admire its architectural beauty and world-class exhibits every day. However, four short decades ago in the 1980s, the future of the once-thriving railway station stood unclear. Plagued with the decrease in railway travel, …
The Heart of Kansas City, Missouri
St. Louisans founded Washington University for the city. As the needs of the community of St. Louis have changed, the university has grown with those changes. The university was established in 1853 by local businessman and politician Wayman Crow. Washington University owed its early development to educator and minister William Greenleaf Eliot. The university’s mission …
Washington University in St. Louis
In Missouri artist George Caleb Bingham’s Fur Trappers Descending the Missouri, a white French fur trader and his biracial son stare back at the viewer as they travel down the Missouri River. Although he was born after the United States government acquired the Louisiana Territory, Bingham knew that Americans were not the first people of …
French Missouri: French Settlement and Community in the Colonial Era
Have you ever wondered why roads end up where they are? The obvious answer is somebody wanted to go from where they were to a new place. Familiar roads, such as the Oregon and Santa Fe Trails, are part of the popular history of the United States. Another road, an integral part of westward expansion …
The Forgotten Trail: Missouri’s Old Wire Road
Charles Augustus Lindbergh (1902-1974) is an extremely complicated person in American history. The virtues, flaws, and downright contradictions of his life and character are the subject of endless debate. What is not disputed is the influence that Lindbergh had on aviation. In an era when air travel, air mail, and even air forces were still …
The Spirit of St. Louis: Charles Lindbergh and the Birth of the St. Louis Air Industry
Missouri neared statehood at a moment of serious financial struggle. Amid the depression that followed the Napoleonic Wars, important banks in Missouri were failing, and Missourians became suspicious of these institutions and the currency they issued. The legislature offered paper money to officials and merchants, which banks had loaned on the government’s credit, but the …
The Start of the Santa Fe Trade
In 1808, Meriwether Lewis, the former explorer and recently appointed governor of the Louisiana Territory, believed a newspaper could encourage public discourse throughout the region. Lewis called upon Joseph Charles, an Irish-born printer from Kentucky, to begin working in St. Louis. In 1808, Charles founded the Missouri Gazette and set up shop at First and …
A Portal into the Past: Prominent Newspapers of Missouri
The Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 occurred just as World War I was winding down. The name, Spanish Influenza, likely derives from the King of Spain’s diagnosis, followed by a sensationalized report of his illness. Unlike many wartime countries, Spain was neutral in the Great War and had no press censorship. The pandemic unfolded in …
The Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and Missouri’s Response
The Louisiana Purchase encompassed 827,000 square miles (530,000,000 acres) of land within the North American continent. Prior to the purchase of Louisiana, the footprint of the United States was confined to land east of the Mississippi River. The purchase gave the United States control of a large section of land in the middle of the …
The Louisiana Purchase
The Springfield Boy Scout Band’s history of goodwill tours, community engagements, and honors began in 1920. Springfield’s Boy Scout organization struggled at the time. Community support for the group came initially from Springfield’s Rotary Club, whose membership made its first civic project the funding of Springfield’s Boy Scouts. The leaders of Springfield’s council of Boy …
Springfield’s Boy Scout Band
Route 66 is collectively remembered as the “Mother Road”: a path to opportunity and a symbol of freedom. Officially named in 1926, this 2,400-mile highway started in Chicago and traveled southwest through eight states before ending in Los Angeles. Route 66 connected small towns to urban centers and facilitated the prolific growth of new towns …
Route 66: America’s Mother Road
In 1995, the mule was recognized as the official animal of Missouri. The honor was much deserved for an animal that helped many Missourians on their farms and many soldiers on the battlefield. The Missouri mule was a prized draft animal known for its strength and agility. In the late nineteenth century, Missouri livestock breeders …
Missouri Mules
Osteopathic medicine emerged in north-central Missouri in the last decade of the 19th century at a time when medicines commonly included addictive opioids and damaging mercury purgatives. Andrew Taylor Still (1828–1917) touted a medicine-free healthcare system that idealized the body as a machine capable of curing itself once restored to proper alignment. Still’s operators, as …
American School of Osteopathic Medicine
Ozark Jubilee was a massively popular country music variety show broadcast from the Jewell Theatre in Springfield, Missouri. It aired weekly on the ABC Television Network from 1955 to 1960. The Jubilee originated in December 1953 as a local television broadcast on KYTV and went through rapid transitions in 1954. From KYTV it was developed into a stage …
Ozark Jubilee
University of Missouri head basketball coach Norm Stewart famously despised the University of Kansas so much that he refused to spend a penny in the Sunflower State. The legendary coach was well known for his hatred of the Jayhawks, even going so far as spending the night in Kansas City and gassing up the bus …
Remembering the Border War in History and Sport
Slightly more than half of German immigrants who came to Missouri during the nineteenth century chose St. Louis as their primary destination. The majority of St. Louis Germans initially came from southern and western Germany, where economic and social upheaval had been the most intensive and devastating. These German immigrants were not destitute peasants but …
St. Louis Germans, 1820 – 1910
During the first half of the nineteenth century, German settlers came as groups, families, or individuals to Missouri. At the time Germany was not yet a united country but a conglomeration of duchies and principalities. As a result, these German immigrants differed in regional origin, social background, and religious persuasion and lacked a shared sense …
Early German Immigration: 1820-1860
Most people today know George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879) as an artist. During his lifetime, Bingham saw himself “as a public officer” or “as a writer,” with “artist” a close third. All views of him are equally true: Bingham was incredibly skilled with a pencil and brush, a fact attested to by the numerous works of …
George Caleb Bingham: The Missouri Artist
On May 29, 1863, Missouri guerrilla Jim Vaughn, escorted by Federal soldiers, walked toward the gallows at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Several weeks earlier, Union soldiers had apprehended Vaughn in Wyandotte, Kansas, while trying to get a haircut. James Blunt, the military commander of Kansas, had a no-quarter policy for Missouri pro-southern guerrillas, or “Bushwhackers” as …
A Desolated Country: The Union Jail Collapse, Lawrence Massacre, and General Order No. 11
The loyalties of Missouri’s German American residents became suspect after the United States entered the Great War on the side of the British and French in April 1917. Most people of German descent actively worked to convince their neighbors of their allegiance to their adopted nation rather than their nation of birth. Federal laws increasingly …
German Americans in World War I
No object better reflected early Missouri’s history than the iconic western paddlewheel steamboat. Missouri boasts of access to two of the nation’s major interior rivers — the Missouri and the Mississippi, and, therefore, the steamboat figures prominently in the early history of the state. Oftentimes, Americans romanticize the steamboat age as a time of slow …
Missouri and the Western Steamboat
During slavery and for years after, white Missourians often boasted that their state’s border location rendered slavery milder than down river in the Cotton Kingdom of the Deep South. They often pointed to Missouri’s more temperate climate, a less arduous work regime, and the “domestic” relations of slavery in a state with few large plantations as …
Social and Working Conditions of Enslaved Families and Communities
In the first half of the twentieth century, segregation and discriminatory practices kept Missouri’s Black residents from accessing equitable medical education and healthcare. After years of lobbying for adequate hospitals, in 1937, St. Louis welcomed a state-of-the-art medical center to serve the Black community. The construction of Homer G. Phillips Hospital represented a transformational moment …
Homer G. Phillips: Transforming Missouri Medicine