Salamanders serve an array of functions in the Missouri environment, as this primer on amphibians by John Crawford suggests.

This third installment of Quinta Scott’s work examining the Mississippi River environment looks at those narrow, man-made spaces between levees and the river, and the life within.

This co-winner of the Tatom Award explores the reasons why Delmar Avenue rather than Cass Avenue became the “Mason-Dixon Line” of St. Louis in the twentieth century.

In this co-winner of the Tatom Award, Julian Barr uses an 1865 divorce case to explore the ways women gained protection against domestic violence through the court system.

Eero Saarinen’s Arch may be among the most recognized works of public art, but the vision that led to the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial was that of Luther Ely Smith. Mark Tranel looks at Smith’s tireless work to have the warehouse district razed and a national memoral built on the St. Louis riverfront.

The bottomland bluffs between the bluffs and levees along the Mississippi have been farmland for centuries. In this second of three photo essays, Quinta Scott documents the manmade environments on the floodplains.

Dr. Joseph Nash Smith’s Missouri Medical College was a leading school for physicians and part of the professionalization of medicine before the Civil War. He also required human dissection that, along with being a St. Louis character, made him one of the period’s most controversial figures as well.

In 1935, Russian satirists Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov bought a Ford and drove across the United States and back; their observations shaped the ideas of Russians about the United States for some three decades. One of the places they visited was Hannibal, Missouri. Here is their account, including their own photos.

Much can be learned about industries from the envelopes and letterheads of companies. Take the sale of human hair in the Gilded Age, for example.

In this photo essay, Quinta Scott examines the natural history of the Mississippi River wetland and the varied landscapes that comprise the American Bottom.

During the Civil War, Union Officers were sometimes inundated with form slaves, which the Union considered "contraband," and refused to return them to their owners. Jane Davis examines these contraband camps in St. Louis.

St. Louis leadership during the Gilded Age was nothing if not confident, even suggesting that the nation's capital be moved to the St. Louis region. Drew VandeCreek offers some of the writings of these boosters.

When the Casino Queen opened on the riverfront at East St. Louis it was touted as a major contributor to the city's economy. Has it been so?

As the city of St. Louis burgeoned in the middle of the nineteenth century, services struggled to keep up. David Straight examines the challenges presented to mail delivery in 1851.

Soldiers in blue and gray weren’t the only ones fighting in the Civil War. Thomas Curran details the efforts of pro-Confederate women who worked as spies, and the efforts by the Union military to counter their activities.

A half-century after the end of the Civil War, sectional tensions still existed in St. Louis. Patrick Burkhardt suggests that the Lost Cause ideology was alive and well in St. Louis, as revealed by the argument over erecting a new Confederate monument in Forest Park.

Like many Protestant denominations, the Presbyterian Church split over the “peculiar institution.” In St. Charles, Missouri, this division became particularly acute when it came to control of property. Katherine Bava examines a case file from the St. Charles Circuit Court that involves this division, the Loyalty Oath, and the Board of Trustees of Linden Wood Female College.

This diary recounts an eyewitness account of “Price’s Raid” in 1864, and the experience of religious leaders who stayed behind when Unionists fled Washington, Missouri.

The Civil War created a groundswell of patriotic fervor on both sides. Here, Paul Huffman looks at a book of music from 1865 in the archives at Lindenwood University and what it says about Northern views of the war and its aftermath.

This selection of diary entries, letters, and sermons by Unitarian minister William Greenleaf Eliot offers insights into the thinking of pro-Union leaders in St. Louis who were also antislavery.

Letters from men at Benton Barracks in St. Louis offer unique insights into the minds of men involved in the Civil War. David Straight looks at these letters and their stationery.

Ty Cobb and Napoleon Lajoie were fighting for the 1910 American League batting title right down to the end of the season. Who won was under dispute, and it landed the St. Louis Browns in court. Gietschier looks at the case files involving the Browns manager who was fired over accusations that he tried to let Lajoie win the title—and a new car.

Neels argues that the Army Corps of Engineers inadvertently dealt the final death blow to dueling in the region when it eliminated “Bloody Island,” a sandbar in the Mississippi River which became a favorite venue for duels.

McCulley discusses opposition to school integration by African American educators in St. Louis at the time of the Brown v. Board of Education Decision.

Danisi offers an analysis of Sibley’s time as assistant factor at Fort Bellefontaine under factor Rodolphe Tillier, a man of strong political connections and elastic ethics. Tillier fired Sibley, Danisi argues, because he discovered and revealed Tillier’s shady business dealings while a government official; ultimately, Sibley was exonerated and even promoted to factor of the newly formed Fort Osage.

This reprint of an 1871 article from Scribner’s Magazine extols the new Illinois and St. Louis Bridge (Eads Bridge today) as an engineering marvel—which, incidentally, it was.

In this regular feature about postal history, Straight examines efforts at reducing smog—smoke abatement, at the time—using a 1906 card and coal company letterhead as a springboard.

The National Road was to span from Maryland to the Mississippi River, but never made it—in part due to a political battle over the location of the new Illinois state capital in the 1830s.

The Consumer Assistance to Recycle and Save Act of 2009 (CARS) was supposed to stimulate the American economy with incentives to trade in old gas-guzzling cars for new, more efficient ones.Three economists examine the impact of this program that came to be called “Cash for Clunkers” on the St. Charles County, Missouri, economy.

In 1828, four Sisters of Charity left Maryland to establish a new mission in the frontier city of St. Louis. For the first time, herein is the diary of one of the travelers in this remarkable and dangerous journey.

When the first Euroamericans arrived in North America, they thought they were seeing a “wilderness,” unaltered by human hands. However, they were actually seeing highly managed environments. Kilburn and Brugam examine the impact of the burning of forests and prairies by Native Americans on the plant species in west-central Illinois.

In the decades after the Wright Brothers launched their firstplane at Kitty Hawk, St. Louis was an aviation hub. Within a decade after that flight, the first airmail left Kinloch Fielin St. Louis, with people sending what they knew were historic letters.

The St. Louis region is situated right at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, which has been constantly changing over the centuries - just like the rest of the region.

Harland Bartholomew's 1948 regional plan was not a radical departure, but heir to almost a century of regional thinking and planning -- including more than three dozen airports.

Talk about junk mail! Makers of Antikamnia tablets, a pain reliever in turn-of-the-century St. Louis, used the mail to sell this patent medicine that was investigated by the new Food and Drug Administration in the Theodore Roosevelt administration.

The politicization of immigrant groups is nothing new, as this study of German immigrants and anti-German sentiment suggests.

New court records shed light on the complex relationships of slavery when a slave enlists in the Union Army during the Civil War.

Floodplains as connectors to rivers are essential parts of the ecosystem; endangered plants chart progress or decline on the Illinois River.

In 1943, Lindenwood English professor and historian Kate Gregg became a Rosie the Riveter at the St. Louis Ordnance Plant. This is her story.