the State Historical Society of Missouri
Bonnie Stepenoff is professor emerita of history at Southeast Missouri State University.
![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]](/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/2024-06/1.-capital-punishment-in-missouri.jpg?itok=KVFfcMMT "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]")
With the exception of two years in the early twentieth century, the state of Missouri has always allowed the…
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…
![A cathedral mosaic of Father Sebastien Louis Meurin performing a baptism. [Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis]](/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/2023-05/1.%20Father%20Meurin_0.jpg?itok=0mN01o6l "A cathedral mosaic of Father Sebastien Louis Meurin performing a baptism. [Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis]")
Sebastien Louis Meurin served as the parish priest in Ste. Genevieve from 1764 through 1768…
![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…