The Last Children Of Mill Creek

Vivian Gibson's bestselling memoir of growing up in the 1950s in a segregated St. Louis neighborhood has been hailed by critics as "a spare, elegant jewel of a work" and "a love letter to Gibson's childhood."

Vivian Gibson grew up in Mill Creek, a neighborhood of St. Louis razed in 1955 to build a highway. Her family, friends, church community, and neighbors were all displaced by urban renewal. In this moving memoir, Gibson recreates the every day lived experiences of her family, including her college-educated mother, who moved to St. Louis as part of the Great Migration, her friends, shop owners, teachers, and others who made Mill Creek into a warm, tight-knit, African-American community, and reflects upon what it means that Mill Creek was destroyed by racism and "urban renewal."

St. Louis is a fragmented place. It’s physically dissected by rivers, highways, walls, and fences, but it’s also a place where one’s race, class, religion, and zip code may as well be cards in a rigged poker game, where the winners’ prize is the ability to ignore the fact that the losers have drastically shorter life expectancies. But it can also be a city of warmth, love, and beauty―especially in its contrasts. Edited by Ryan Schuessler (Sweeter Voices Still: An LGBTQ Anthology from Middle America), the collection features nearly 70 essays penned by St. Louis writers, journalists, clerics, poets, and activists including Aisha Sultan, Galen Gritts, Vivian Gibson, Maja Sadikovic, Nartana Premachandra, Sophia Benoit, Robert Langellier, Samuel Autman, Umar Lee, and more.

John Stuart Mill was one of the most important and influential British philosophers. When one considers his overall intellectual contributions, Mill is arguably the most important intellectual figure of the nineteenth century. Covering all the key concepts of his work, Starting with Mill provides an accessible introduction to the ideas of this hugely significant thinker. Clearly structured according to Mill's key works, the book leads the reader through a thorough overview of the development of his thought, resulting in a more thorough understanding of the roots of his philosophical concerns. Offering coverage of the full range of Mill's ideas, the book explores his contributions to metaphysics and epistemology, logic, psychology, political economy, ethics, utilitarianism, and liberalism. The book introduces the major thinkers whose work proved influential in the development of Mill's thought, including Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, Adam Smith, John Locke and the other British Empiricists.

From the outside, some families appear to be untouchable. No conflicts within could cause ugliness or bitterness; no external force could shatter their assured, confident aura. The world saw the McQuade family through such a prism -- a slice of suburban perfection, a page-from-a-magazine existence for Melanie and Tom McQuade and their two gifted children. But Melanie's sister, documentary filmmaker Lex Cavanaugh, knows that nothing is as it appears; the truth of any picture lies in the eye of the beholder. And soon an unthinkable crime will shake Lex to the core, challenging everything she has known about her estranged family -- and herself. Lex receives the wrenching news in an urgent e-mail from her nephew, Jared: his ten-year-old sister Calista, a talented gymnast with Olympic potential, has been found murdered. Rushing from her home in London to Melanie's house in exclusive Westport, Connecticut, Lex re-enters a family living out its worst nightmare -- with each of the members cast in the light of suspicion, even among themselves. As the homicide investigation unfolds, a startling, unexpected group portrait reveals itself: Lex's obsessive, controlling sister, her TV-personality brother-in-law, and the intensely unhappy young Jared, in whom Lex sees her childhood self. Sifting through a decade of hidden indiscretions, raw resentments, and buried truths, Lex knows she must unlock the secrets of the past if there is any hope at all for their future. With a fresh voice and an unsparing eye, Caroline Slate has crafted a literary gem that is at the same time a tense, disarming psychological thriller in the tradition of Jacquelyn Mitchard and Ruth Rendell -- a page-turner that exposes the chilling, entangled secrets which may tear one family apart.

Sarah Magarity just broke the first rule of social work: don't get personally involved. But how can she ignore the orphaned tyke who shows up in her office on Christmas Eve? The chance to make a difference is awfully tempting. So's the rancher with the sexy smile who might be the boy's father. Still, Sarah has to be nuts to let Ty Parker sweet-talk her into a cattle drive across rugged Florida wilderness. Ty can't believe he might have a son to carry on his legacy. Still, until the DNA results come back, he isn't making any plans. But a strange thing happens on the open road. Amid rattlesnake scares and cozy campfires, he's growing closer to the boy...and to Sarah, the fiery redhead Ty can't keep out of his arms. They could be a happy family, unless the truth tears them apart....

Since the founding of St. Louis, African Americans have lived in communities throughout the area. Although St. Louis' 1916 "Segregation of the Negro Ordinance" was ruled unconstitutional, African Americans were restricted to certain areas through real estate practices such as steering and red lining. Through legal efforts in the court cases of Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948, Jones v. Mayer in 1978, and others, more housing options became available and the population dispersed. Many of the communities began to decline, disappear, or experience urban renewal.

Since the founding of St. Louis in 1764, Downtown St. Louis has been a center of black cultural, economic, political, and legal achievements that have shaped not only the city of St. Louis, but the nation as well. From James Beckworth, one of the founders of Denver, Colorado, to Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Todd Lincoln's seamstress and author of the only behind-the-scenes account of Lincoln's White House years, black residents of Downtown St. Louis have made an indelible mark in American history. From the monumental Dred Scott case to entertainers such as Josephine Baker, Downtown St. Louis has been home to many unforgettable faces, places, and events that have shaped and strengthened the American experience for all.