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Working the Mississippi

Two Centuries of Life on the River

Bonnie Stepenoff

Working the Mississippi

206 pages

Published: June 2015

24 illus.

ISBN: 9780826220530

Formats:

Hardcover
Digital download

Price: $40.00

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About This Book

The Mississippi River occupies a sacred place in American culture and mythology. Often called The Father of Rivers, it winds through American life in equal measure as a symbol and as a topographic feature. To the people who know it best, the river is life and a livelihood. River boatmen working the wide Mississippi are never far from land. Even in the dark, they can smell plants and animals and hear people on the banks and wharves.

Bonnie Stepenoff takes readers on a cruise through history, showing how workers from St. Louis to Memphis changed the river and were in turn changed by it. Each chapter of this fast-moving narrative focuses on representative workers: captains and pilots, gamblers and musicians, cooks and craftsmen. Readers will find workers who are themselves part of the country’s mythology from Mark Twain and anti-slavery crusader William Wells Brown to musicians Fate Marable and Louis Armstrong.

Authors and Editors

Bonnie Stepenoff grew up in the hills of northeastern Pennsylvania and eventually moved to Missouri, where she became a professor of history at Southeast Missouri State University. Now retired, she continues to write non-fiction and poetry. She has six books to her credit, including Working the Mississippi: Two Centuries of Life on the River (University of Missouri Press, 2015), The Dead End Kids of St. Louis: Homeless Boys and the People who Tried to Save Them (University of Missouri Press, 2010), Big Spring Autumn (Truman State University Press, 2008), From French Community to Missouri Town: Ste. Genevieve in the Nineteenth Century (University of Missouri Press, 2006), Thad Snow: A Life of Social Reform in Southeast Missouri (University of Missouri Press, 2003), and Their Fathers’ Daughters: Silk Mill Workers in Northeastern Pennsylvania (Susquehanna University Press, 1999). Her articles, essays, and poetry have appeared in many anthologies and journals, including the Sherlock Holmes Journal (2016), Missouri Law and the American Conscience (2016), Red Moon Anthology (2009 and 2016), Yonder Mountain: An Ozarks Anthology (2013), Cultural Landscapes (2008), Mining Women (2006), The Other Missouri History (2004), Rebellious Families (2002), Labor History, Labor’s Heritage, New York History, Pennsylvania History, Missouri Historical Review, Gateway, Missouri Conservationist, Missouri Life, Modern Haiku, Frogpond, and The Heron’s Nest. She lives in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

Praise For This Book

“Joining many recent publications that link spatial and social history, Bonnie Stepenoff’s Working the Mississippi: Two Centuries of Life on the River examines the complicated encounters ‘between workers on the boats and workers in the riverfront cities and towns on the middle Mississippi between St. Louis and Memphis’ (p. xix). Stepenoff narrates her story of this corridor in a way that takes the reader on what feels like an actual trip on the river across time.”—Journal of Southern History

“The greatest value of Stepenoff’s book: she invites the readers to look more closely at subjects they may have a passing familiarity with, and, by doing so, to see connections to ideas and things that they had not thought of as associated with the Mississippi River at all.”—The Annals of Iowa
“Working the Mississippi, which offers a wonderful look at life on and along the river, offers a marvelous take on the Middle-Mississippi Valley where readers become passengers witnessing the triumphs and failures of gamblers, seeing the ‘swagger’ of a pilot navigating dangerous bends and breaks, enjoying the music of a young Louis Armstrong, or experiencing the devastating consequences of living near the river. It is a text that should be valued and read by anyone seeking to know more about life along the Mississippi.”—Arkansas Review
“Bonnie Stepenoff’s account of life along the middle Mississippi in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries examines the stream’s allure and its impact on those who traversed its waters and inhabited the cities and towns along its banks. Cognizant of the river’s connections to history and the patterns of daily living, Stepenoff writes about people and places she knows and understands.”—William E. Foley, author of The First Chouteaus: River Barons of Early St. Louis
“A thrilling literary tour along the Mississippi River as Bonnie Stepenoff’s evocative prose conjures scenes from the last two centuries.”—Gateway, the magazine of the Missouri History Museum

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Working the Mississippi Digital download  by Bonnie Stepenoff

Working the Mississippi

Two Centuries of Life on the River

Bonnie Stepenoff

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