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From its founding in the early 1830s, Springfield was a rough frontier town where whiskey flowed freely, gunplay and fistfights abounded and gambling thrived. The Civil War not only brought the horror of warfare home to Springfield but also introduced worldly vices like prostitution that were scarcely known in previous years. Yet throughout its history, Springfield has managed to maintain a veneer of respectability not shared by certain other towns of southwest Missouri that were founded as wild, wide-open mining camps, like Joplin and Granby. Join Larry Wood as he digs beneath the surface of Queen City history to expose notorious characters and capers that would make even Joplinites blush.
Explores the history of Springfield, Missouri.
Watch a duel on Bloody Island from the stern of a river pirate's ship and be glad that Abraham Lincoln did not have to keep his appointment. Venture into a brothel where a madam's grin was filled with diamonds or where "Ta Ra Ra Boom de Ay" was hummed for the first time. Witness children forced into labor and aristocrats driven to suicide. Keep company with the gangsters who were a little too "cuckoo" for Al Capone. Visit Wicked St. Louis.
Echoes of a dynamic history still linger in Springfield, Missouri. The town square was the scene of a Civil War battle, a Wild Bill Hickok shootout and a tragic 1906 lynching. From the phantom landlord of Jefferson Avenue to the spectral bride of Grove Park Bridge, meet figures from the town's past that continue to mystify its present. Pore over reports of supernatural activity at Drury College and the Landers Theater and investigate a bounty of bizarre, sensational rumors from the surrounding countryside in this collection of Springfield ghost lore.
In this sweeping collection of essays, reportage and criticism, Hitchens' polemical talents at their most fearsome. "I did not, I wish to state, become a journalist because there was no other 'profession' that would have me. I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information." Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays showcases the Hitchens' rejection of consensus and cliché, whether he's reporting from abroad in Indonesia, Kurdistan, Iraq, North Korea, or Cuba, or when his pen is targeted mercilessly at the likes of William Clinton, Mother Theresa ("a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud"), the Dalai Lama, Noam Chomsky, Mel Gibson and Michael Bloomberg. Hitchens began the nineties as a "darling of the left" but has become more of an "unaffiliated radical" whose targets include those on the "left," who he accuses of "fudging" the issue of military intervention in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet, as Hitchens shows in his reportage, cultural and literary criticism, and opinion essays from the last decade, he has not jumped ship and joined the right but is faithful to the internationalist, contrarian and democratic ideals that have always informed his work.
Tracing Route 66 through Missouri represents one of America's favorite exercises in nostalgia, but a discerning glance among the roadside weeds reveals the kind of sordid history that doesn't appear on postcards. Along with vintage cars and picnic baskets, Route 66 was a conduit humming with contraband and crackling with the gunplay of folks like Bonnie and Clyde, Jesse James and the Young brothers. It was also the preferred byway of lynch mobs, murderous hitchhikers and mad scientists. Stop in at places like the Devil's Elbow and the Steffleback Bordello on this trip through the more treacherous twists of the Mother Road.
True stories of Ma Barker, Belle Starr, Bonnie Parker, and other historical female desperadoes of the Midwest . . . Includes photos. Marauders like Jesse James and the Younger gang earned Missouri the title of “Outlaw State,” but the male desperadoes had nothing on their female counterparts . . . Belle “Queen of the Bandits” Starr and Cora Hubbard kept Missouri’s sensationalist newspapers and dime novelists in business with exploits ranging from horse thefts to bank heists. Missouri native Ma Barker and her murderous sons rose to infamy during the gangster era of the 1930s, while Bonnie Parker crisscrossed the state with Clyde Barrow. From savvy burlesque dancers to deadly gold diggers, historian Larry Wood chronicles the titillating stories of ten of the Show-Me State’s shadiest ladies.
A strange sort of pride tends to embellish infamy, like the notion that Frank and Jesse James robbed every bank in Missouri. But the citizens of Joplin need not exaggerate their community's unsavory past. Founded in the 1870s as a booming lead-mining camp, Joplin was a wide-open town from the start, and its wild reputation persisted into the mid-twentieth century. A neighboring town's newspaper aptly described Joplin as a naughty place."? Join author Larry Wood on a colorful tour of the city's raucous past."
Overnight settlements, better known as "Hell on Wheels," sprang up as the transcontinental railroad crossed Nebraska and Wyoming. They brought opportunity not only for legitimate business but also for gamblers, land speculators, prostitutes, and thugs. Dick Kreck tells their stories along with the heroic individuals who managed, finally, to create permanent towns in the interior West.
Missouri's state capital groans beneath the burden of its haunted heritage, from the shadow people of Native American folklore to Boogie Man Bill, Missouri's wild child. The muddy river waters hide the shifting graves of steamboat crews, like the one that went down with the Montana, and the savage scars of the Civil War still linger on the land. Join Janice Tremeear for the fascinating history behind Jefferson City's most chilling tales, including a visit to the notorious Missouri State Penitentiary, where the vicious festered for 170 years.