Becoming St. Louis: Family, Faith, and the Politics of Citizenship, 1820-1920

St. Louis was the pivot of the free states and slave states and the border of the settled East and frontier West. Sharon Hartman Strom draws on disparate and previously untapped sources to weave the personal and public lives of women and both free and enslaved African Americans into city history. Strom’s analysis shows how the embrace of Protestantism by people of color sparked a vigorous antislavery movement. During the Civil War, several prominent citizens served in the Lincoln cabinet an...