St. Louis: An Illustrated History

August 21, 2018 Posted by: Tom Dewey, Librarian

St. Louis: An Illustrated Timeline: Blues, Baseball, Books, Crooks, Civil Rights, and the River, by Carol Shepley. St. Louis: Reedy Press, 2014.

Author and historian Carol Shepley covers a lot of historical ground in St. Louis: An Illustrated Timeline.  The author captures some of the city’s most pivotal moments in a book that features dozens of capsule histories, arranged in chronological order.

Readers will encounter dozens of people who had an impact on the city of St. Louis. People as diverse as fur trader Jacques Clamorgan, entertainer Josephine Baker, engineer James B. Eads, Washington University founder William Greenleaf Eliot, architect Eero Saarinen, and baseball great Stan Musial are all featured here, as well as many others. 

Shepley includes a brief section on Mark Twain and St. Louis.  She writes about the famous author returning to St. Louis in 1882 to gather impressions for his book Life on the Mississippi. Shepley includes Twain’s famous quote about the city, which appeared in Life on the Mississippi: “The first time I ever saw St. Louis, I could have bought it for six million dollars, and it was the mistake of my life that I did not do it.”
 
Also included in this fine overview are informative capsule histories of events like the Great St. Louis Flood of 1993, the separation of St. Louis City and County in 1876, and the dedication of Forest Park in 1876. 

The book’s foreword, written by local historian Esley Hamilton, highlights the fact that minorities play an important part in the city’s history and in this book. Hamilton writes, “Shepley recognizes that the makers of this city weren’t all men and weren’t all white. The struggle for racial equality has played and continues to play an important role here.” Many important figures such as Dred and Harriet Scott, and Elijah Lovejoy, are featured prominently throughout the book.
 
St. Louis: An Illustrated Timeline is true to its name-it contains hundreds of photographs to help readers imagine the people and events described within its pages.  Anyone wanting an overview of the city’s historical and cultural past will be generally pleased with Shepley’s approach.