Zoë Akins portrait

Zoë Byrd Akins was born on October 30, 1886, in Humansville, Missouri, the second of three children of Thomas…

The Ben Bolt Theatre. [Courtesy of Danny Knouse]

The Ben Bolt Theatre was a spectacular building that stood for half a century as a notable…

Robert Russell Bennett (right) with Salvatore Dell’Isola at rehearsals for the Broadway production of South Pacific. Bennett served as orchestrator for the show, and Dell’Isola as musical director. [New York Public Library Digital Collections, Billy Rose Theatre Collection Photograph File, TH-52233]

Robert Russell Bennett was born on June 15, 1894, in Kansas City, Missouri, the only son of…

Kenneth Brown Billups Sr. [National Association of Negro Musicians]

Kenneth Brown Billups Sr. was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 14, 1918, the son of…

William K. Bixby. [Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Photographs and Prints Collection, N20996]

One of the key St. Louis businessmen and philanthropists of his generation in St. Louis,…

Karl Bodmer circa 1877. [Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-50540]

Among the early artists to explore the trans-Mississippi River frontier, Karl Bodmer’s stay…

George Catlin posed for this portrait by English landscape artist William Fisk in 1849. [National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, NPG.70.14]

George Catlin was among the earliest Euro-American artists to paint the Indigenous peoples…

Kate Chopin portrait

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

Edmond J. Eckel. [Elwood L. McDonald, History of Buchanan County and St. Joseph, Missouri, 1915]

Born on June 22, 1845, in Strasbourg, France, Edmond Jacques Eckel demonstrated an early…

W. C. Handy playing at the fifth annual American Negro Music Festival in St. Louis’s Sportsman’s Park in 1944. [State Historical Society of Missouri, Arthur Witman 120mm Photograph Collection (S0732), 732.31462]

Although William Christopher Handy spent relatively little of his long life in Missouri,…