Bonnie Stepenoff is professor emerita of history at Southeast Missouri State University.

Articles Authored

The Administration Building at the Missouri State Penitentiary, 1955. Missouri carried out executions at the penitentiary’s gas chamber from 1937 until switching to lethal injection in 1989 and moving its death row to the Potosi Correctional Center in Washington County. [Missouri State Archives/Missouri Digital Heritage, Mark Schreiber Collection, MS297_255_009]
Capital Punishment in Missouri

With the exception of two years in the early twentieth century, the state of Missouri has always allowed the…

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Kate Chopin portrait
Kate Chopin (1850–1904)

Kate Chopin began and ended her life in St. Louis, with an interlude as a young wife and mother in New…

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Fran Landesman at the Crystal Palace, 1961. [State Historical Society of Missouri, Thelma Blumberg Collection, S0402]
Fran Landesman (1927–2011)

Fran Landesman launched her career as a jazz lyricist in St. Louis in the 1950s. A native New Yorker, she was…

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William McKendree. [O. P. Fitzgerald, Centenary Cameos: 1784–1884]
William McKendree (1757–1835)

William McKendree was the first American-born bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church and…

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A cathedral mosaic of Father Sebastien Louis Meurin performing a baptism. [Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis]
Sebastien Louis Meurin (1707–1777)

Sebastien Louis Meurin served as the parish priest in Ste. Genevieve from 1764 through 1768…

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