Bonnie Stepenoff's Books

Thad Snow

A Life of Social Reform in the Missouri Bootheel

By: Bonnie Stepenoff

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Thad Snow

A Life of Social Reform in the Missouri Bootheel

By: Bonnie Stepenoff

Thad Snow (1881-1955) was an eccentric farmer and writer who was best known for his involvement in Missouri's 1939 Sharecropper Protest--a mass highway demonstration in which approximately eleven hundred demonstrators marched to two federal highways to illustrate the plight of the cotton laborers. Snow struggled to make sense of the changing world, and his answers to questions regarding race, social justice, the environment, and international war placed him at odds with many. In Thad Snow, Bonnie Stepenoff explores the world of Snow, providing a full portrait of him. Snow settled in the Missouri Bootheel in 1910--"Swampeast Missouri," as he called it--when it was still largely an undeveloped region of hardwood and cypress swamps. He cleared and drained a thousand acres and became a prominent landowner, highway booster, and promoter of economic development--though he later questioned the wisdom of developing wild land. In the early 1920s, "cotton fever" came to the region, and Snow started producing cotton in the rich southeast Missouri soil. Although he employed sharecroppers, he became a bitter critic of the system that exploited labor and fostered racism. In the 1930s, when a massive flood and the Great Depression heaped misery on the farmworkers, he rallied to their cause. Defying the conventions of his class, he invited the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union (STFU) to organize workers on his land. He became a friend and colleague of Owen Whitfield, an African American minister, who led the Sharecroppers' Roadside Strike of 1939. The successes of this great demonstration convinced Snow that mankind could fight injustice by peaceful means. While America mobilized for World War II, he denounced all war as evil, remaining a committed pacifist until his death in 1955. Shortly before he died, Snow published an autobiographical memoir, From Missouri, in which he affirmed his optimistic belief that people could peacefully change the world. This biography places Snow in the context of his place and time, revealing a unique individual who agonized over racial and economic oppression and environmental degradation. Snow lived, worked, and pondered the connections among these issues in a small rural corner of Missouri, but he thought in global terms. Well-crafted and highly readable, Thad Snow provides an astounding assessment of an agricultural entrepreneur transformed into a social critic and an activist.

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Page Count

200

Publisher

University of Missouri Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0826264557

ISBN 13

9780826264558

Their Fathers' Daughters

Silk Mill Workers in Northeastern Pennsylvania, 1880-1960

By: Bonnie Stepenoff

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Their Fathers' Daughters

Silk Mill Workers in Northeastern Pennsylvania, 1880-1960

By: Bonnie Stepenoff

Social reformers of the early twentieth century drew attention to the tender age of many of the silk workers. Through the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, these female workers struggled to establish themselves, not as childlike victims, but as independent women, capable of finding their own way in the world and standing up for their own rights."--BOOK JACKET.

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Page Count

212

Publisher

Susquehanna University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1575910284

ISBN 13

9781575910284

Working the Mississippi

Two Centuries of Life on the River

By: Bonnie Stepenoff

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Working the Mississippi

Two Centuries of Life on the River

By: Bonnie Stepenoff

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.

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Page Count

207

Publisher

University of Missouri Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0826273491

ISBN 13

9780826273499

The Dead End Kids of St. Louis

Homeless Boys and the People Who Tried to Save Them

By: Bonnie Stepenoff

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The Dead End Kids of St. Louis

Homeless Boys and the People Who Tried to Save Them

By: Bonnie Stepenoff

Joe Garagiola remembers playing baseball with stolen balls and bats while growing up on the Hill. Chuck Berry had run-ins with police before channeling his energy into rock and roll. But not all the boys growing up on the rough streets of St. Louis had loving families or managed to find success. This book reviews a century of history to tell the story of the “lost” boys who struggled to survive on the city’s streets as it evolved from a booming late-nineteenth-century industrial center to a troubled mid-twentieth-century metropolis. To the eyes of impressionable boys without parents to shield them, St. Louis presented an ever-changing spectacle of violence. Small, loosely organized bands from the tenement districts wandered the city looking for trouble, and they often found it. The geology of St. Louis also provided for unique accommodations—sometimes gangs of boys found shelter in the extensive system of interconnected caves underneath the city. Boys could hide in these secret lairs for weeks or even months at a stretch. Bonnie Stepenoff gives voice to the harrowing experiences of destitute and homeless boys and young men who struggled to grow up, with little or no adult supervision, on streets filled with excitement but also teeming with sharpsters ready to teach these youngsters things they would never learn in school. Well-intentioned efforts of private philanthropists and public officials sometimes went cruelly astray, and sometimes were ineffective, but sometimes had positive effects on young lives. Stepenoff traces the history of several efforts aimed at assisting the city’s homeless boys. She discusses the prison-like St. Louis House of Refuge, where more than 80 percent of the resident children were boys, and Father Dunne's News Boys' Home and Protectorate, which stressed education and training for more than a century after its founding. She charts the growth of Skid Row and details how historical events such as industrialization, economic depression, and wars affected this vulnerable urban population. Most of these boys grew up and lived decent, unheralded lives, but that doesn’t mean that their childhood experiences left them unscathed. Their lives offer a compelling glimpse into old St. Louis while reinforcing the idea that society has an obligation to create cities that will nurture and not endanger the young.

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Page Count

194

Publisher

University of Missouri Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0826272142

ISBN 13

9780826272140

From French Community to Missouri Town

Ste. Genevieve in the Nineteenth Century

By: Bonnie Stepenoff

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From French Community to Missouri Town

Ste. Genevieve in the Nineteenth Century

By: Bonnie Stepenoff

A small French settlement thrived for half a century on the west bank of the Mississippi River before the Louisiana Purchase made it part of the United States in 1803. But for the citizens of Ste. Genevieve, becoming Americans involved more than simply acknowledging a transfer of power. Bonnie Stepenoff has written an engaging history of Missouri’s oldest permanent settlement to explore what it meant to be Americanized in our country’s early years. Picking up where other studies of Ste. Genevieve leave off, she traces the dramatic changes wrought by the transfer of sovereignty to show the process of social and economic transformation on a young nation’s new frontier. Stepenoff tells how French and Spanish residents—later joined by German immigrants and American settlers—made necessary compromises to achieve order and community, forging a democracy that represented different approaches to such matters as education, religion, property laws, and women’s rights. By examining the town’s historical circumstances, its legal institutions, and especially its popular customs, she shows how Ste. Genevieve differed from other towns along the Mississippi. Stepenoff has plumbed the town’s voluminous archives to share previously untold stories of Ste. Genevieve citizens that reflect how Americanization affected their lives. In these pages we meet a free woman of color who sued a prominent white family for support of her children; a slave who obtained her own freedom and then purchased her daughters’ freedom; a local sheriff who joined Aaron Burr’s conspiracy; and a doctor who treated cholera victims and later became a U.S. senator. More than colorful characters, these are real people shown pursuing justice and liberty under a new flag. The story of Ste. Genevieve serves as a testament to Tocqueville’s observations on American democracy while also challenging some of the commonly held beliefs about that institution. From French Community to Missouri Town provides a better understanding not only of how democracy works but also of what it meant to become American when America was still young.

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Page Count

248

Publisher

University of Missouri Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0826265650

ISBN 13

9780826265654

From French Community to Missouri Town

Ste. Genevieve in the Nineteenth Century Volume 1

By: Bonnie Stepenoff

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From French Community to Missouri Town

Ste. Genevieve in the Nineteenth Century Volume 1

By: Bonnie Stepenoff

A small French settlement thrived for half a century on the west bank of the Mississippi River before the Louisiana Purchase made it part of the United States in 1803. But for the citizens of Ste. Genevieve, becoming Americans involved more than simply acknowledging a transfer of power. Bonnie Stepenoff has written an engaging history of Missouri's oldest permanent settlement to explore what it meant to be Americanized in our country's early years. Picking up where other studies of Ste. Genevieve leave off, she traces the dramatic changes wrought by the transfer of sovereignty to show the process of social and economic transformation on a young nation's new frontier. Stepenoff tells how French and Spanish residents--later joined by German immigrants and American settlers--made necessary compromises to achieve order and community, forging a democracy that represented different approaches to such matters as education, religion, property laws, and women's rights. By examining the town's historical circumstances, its legal institutions, and especially its popular customs, she shows how Ste. Genevieve differed from other towns along the Mississippi. Stepenoff has plumbed the town's voluminous archives to share previously untold stories of Ste. Genevieve citizens that reflect how Americanization affected their lives. In these pages we meet a free woman of color who sued a prominent white family for support of her children; a slave who obtained her own freedom and then purchased her daughters' freedom; a local sheriff who joined Aaron Burr's conspiracy; and a doctor who treated cholera victims and later became a U.S. senator. More than colorful characters, these are real people shown pursuing justice and liberty under a new flag. The story of Ste. Genevieve serves as a testament to Tocqueville's observations on American democracy while also challenging some of the commonly held beliefs about that institution. From French Community to Missouri Town provides a better understanding not only of how democracy works but also of what it meant to become American when America was still young.

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Page Count

250

Publisher

University of Missouri Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0826223133

ISBN 13

9780826223135

Thad Snow

A Life of Social Reform in the Missouri Bootheel

By: Bonnie Stepenoff

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Thad Snow

A Life of Social Reform in the Missouri Bootheel

By: Bonnie Stepenoff

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Age

Page Count

200

Publisher

University of Missouri Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0826264557

ISBN 13

9780826264558

Their Fathers' Daughters

Silk Mill Workers in Northeastern Pennsylvania, 1880-1960

By: Bonnie Stepenoff

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Their Fathers' Daughters

Silk Mill Workers in Northeastern Pennsylvania, 1880-1960

By: Bonnie Stepenoff

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

212

Publisher

Susquehanna University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1575910284

ISBN 13

9781575910284

Book's by Bonnie Stepenoff

Thad Snow

Thad Snow

Their Fathers' Daughters

Their Fathers' Daughters

Working the Mississippi

Working the Mississippi

The Dead End Kids of St. Louis

The Dead End Kids of St. Louis

From French Community to Missouri Town

From French Community to Missouri Town

From French Community to Missouri Town

From French Community to Missouri Town

Thad Snow

Thad Snow

Their Fathers' Daughters

Their Fathers' Daughters

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