San Antonio College Library

This work looks at the history of the Mississippi River Valley in the nineteenth century and the economy that developed there, powered by steam engines and slave labor. When Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Territory, he envisioned an "empire for liberty" populated by self-sufficient white farmers. Cleared of Native Americans and the remnants of European empires by Andrew Jackson, the Mississippi Valley was transformed instead into a booming capitalist...

"The mighty Mississippi" has inspired writers and artists for centuries. During the nineteenth century, Mississippi River towns attracted artists who traveled throughout the United States producing detailed drawings of cities and towns, which were then printed and sold as lithographs or used as wood engravings to illustrate books and magazines. Depicting each street and building, as well as the natural setting and geographic features of the surrounding...

From the fall of Cahokia in the early fourteenth century to the ascendancy of the young United States in the early nineteenth century, Jacob Lee reinterprets the history of early North America by tracing the key role major midcontinental rivers and social networks played in linking Indian nations and European empires in a long, shared history of conquest and resistance. Long before Europeans set foot on the shores of North America, Siouan peoples...

The early history of St. Louis and French activities in the Mississippi Valley are described from many aspects in these fourteen papers originally presented at a conference observing the 200th anniversary of the founding of St. Louis by Pierre de Laclède on Feb. 15, 1764.

An account of the ecological and historical impact of a series of Mississippi River Valley earthquakes in 1811 and 1812 documents how towns were destroyed and political loyalties were altered, changing the course of the War of 1812.

In The Big Muddy, The First Long-Term Environmental History Of The Mississippi, Christopher Morris offers a brilliant tour across five centuries as he illuminates the interaction between people and the landscape, from early hunter-gatherer bands to present-day industrial and post-industrial society. Morris shows that when Hernando de Soto arrived at the lower Mississippi Valley, he found an incredibly vast wetland, forty thousand square miles of...