the State Historical Society of Missouri
Bonnie Stepenoff is professor emerita of history at Southeast Missouri State University.
Articles Authored
Kate Chopin began and ended her life in St. Louis, with an interlude as a young wife and mother in New…
![William McKendree. [O. P. Fitzgerald, Centenary Cameos: 1784–1884]](/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/2023-01/1.%20William%20McKendree.jpg?itok=lAtk9CJD "William McKendree. [O. P. Fitzgerald, Centenary Cameos: 1784–1884]")
William McKendree was the first American-born bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church and…
![This eighteenth-century map shows the mouth of the River Des Peres (unnamed, below St. Louis) and the Kaskaskia village to the south on the opposite side of the Mississippi, where the River Des Peres mission resettled after abandoning the site in what is now south St. Louis. [Frederick Charles Hicks, ed., A Topographical Description of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland and North Carolina, 1778]](/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/2023-01/1.%20River%20Des%20Peres.jpg?itok=KH5WSCIg "This eighteenth-century map shows the mouth of the River Des Peres (unnamed, below St. Louis) and the Kaskaskia village to the south on the opposite side of the Mississippi, where the River Des Peres mission resettled after abandoning the site in what is now south St. Louis. [Frederick Charles Hicks, ed., A Topographical Description of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland and North Carolina, 1778]")
More than half a century before the founding of St. Louis, French priests established a…