The German Element In St Louis

As a result of the nineteenth-century German emigration to the United States, St. Louis, Missouri, along with Milwaukee and Cincinnati, would become constituted as the great "German triangle" of the Midwest. In 1893, Ernst Kargau, a reporter and editor for various German-American newspapers, published a German language commemorative history of St. Louis' German population entitled St. Louis in Former Years. Kargau's urban memoir constitutes one of the best snapshots we have of culture and society in a German-American community on the eve of World War I.

Why have Americans expressed concern about immigration at some times but not at others? In pursuit of an answer, this book examines America’s first nativist movement, which responded to the rapid influx of 4.2 million immigrants between 1840 and 1860 and culminated in the dramatic rise of the National American Party. As previous studies have focused on the coasts, historians have not yet completely explained why westerners joined the ranks of the National American, or “Know Nothing,” Party or why the nation’s bloodiest anti-immigrant riots erupted in western cities—namely Chicago, Cincinnati, Louisville, and St. Louis. In focusing on the antebellum West, Inventing America’s First Immigration Crisis illuminates the cultural, economic, and political issues that originally motivated American nativism and explains how it ultimately shaped the political relationship between church and state. In six detailed chapters, Ritter explains how unprecedented immigration from Europe and rapid westward expansion re-ignited fears of Catholicism as a corrosive force. He presents new research on the inner sanctums of the secretive Order of Know-Nothings and provides original data on immigration, crime, and poverty in the urban West. Ritter argues that the country’s first bout of political nativism actually renewed Americans’ commitment to church–state separation. Native-born Americans compelled Catholics and immigrants, who might have otherwise shared an affinity for monarchism, to accept American-style democracy. Catholics and immigrants forced Americans to adopt a more inclusive definition of religious freedom. This study offers valuable insight into the history of nativism in U.S. politics and sheds light on present-day concerns about immigration, particularly the role of anti-Islamic appeals in recent elections.

Following the Civil War, large corporations emerged in the United States and became intent on maximizing their power and profits at all costs. Political corruption permeated American society as those corporate entities grew and spread across the country, leaving bribery and exploitation in their wake. This alliance between corporate America and the political class came to a screeching halt during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, when the U.S. workers in the railroad, mining, canal, and manufacturing industries called a general strike against monopoly capitalism and brought the country to an economic standstill. In The St. Louis Commune of 1877 Mark Kruger tells the riveting story of how workers assumed political control in St. Louis, Missouri. Kruger examines the roots of the St. Louis Commune—focusing on the 1848 German revolution, the Paris Commune, and the First International. Not only was 1877 the first instance of a general strike in U.S. history; it was also the first time workers took control of a major American city and the first time a city was ruled by a communist party.

A gripping and original account of how the Civil War began and a second American revolution unfolded, setting Abraham Lincoln on the path to greatness and millions of slaves on the road to freedom. An epic of courage and heroism beyond the battlefields, 1861 introduces us to a heretofore little-known cast of Civil War heroes—among them an acrobatic militia colonel, an explorer’s wife, an idealistic band of German immigrants, a regiment of New York City firemen, a community of Virginia slaves, and a young college professor who would one day become president. Their stories take us from the corridors of the White House to the slums of Manhattan, from the waters of the Chesapeake to the deserts of Nevada, from Boston Common to Alcatraz Island, vividly evoking the Union at its moment of ultimate crisis and decision. Hailed as “exhilarating….Inspiring…Irresistible…” by The New York Times Book Review, Adam Goodheart’s bestseller 1861 is an important addition to the Civil War canon. Includes black-and-white photos and illustrations.

As provisional governor of Missouri during the Civil War, Hamilton Gamble (1798--1864) worked closely with the Lincoln administration to keep the state from seceding from the Union. Without Gamble and other loyal Unionist governors, the war in the West might have been lost. Dennis Boman's full-scale account of Gamble's life tells the little-known story of a prominent frontier lawyer who became chief justice of the Missouri Supreme Court and boldly dissented in the infamous Dred Scott decision. Revealing how Gamble, one of the wealthiest and most renowned citizens of pre--Civil War Missouri, fought to end slavery and to protect the integrity of the Union, Lincoln's Resolute Unionist corrects prevailing notions about solidarity among the South's antebellum elite on these issues. The slaveholding border state of Missouri figured greatly in the sectional crisis from the time of its controversial admission to the Union up through the war itself, when it was the site of internecine battles between Unionists and Confederates. The complexities of the period and of the political alliances formed then emerge clearly in Boman's biography of Gamble. A fundamental conservatism -- Gamble believed judges should interpret, not make, law -- led the southern slave owner to dissent from his colleagues' proslavery decision in Scott v. Emerson. These same principles, along with Gamble's Whig affiliation and Christian convictions, made firm his antisecessionist stance despite his proslavery predilections. Boman provides a groundbreaking analysis of Lincoln's involvement in Missouri's affairs, including his assistance to Gamble in maintaining security and passing a state ordinance for gradual emancipation. Lincoln's Resolute Unionist brings to light in a compelling fashion the meaning -- and the drama -- of the life of a key figure at a critical time in American history.