The Other Missouri History: Populists, Prostitutes, and Regular Folk.

The Other Missouri History: Populists, Prostitutes, and Regular Folk. Edited and with an introduction by Thomas M. Spencer. (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, c. 2004. Pp. x, 241. $24.95, ISBN 0-8262-1565-3.)

This volume brings the so-called new history that focuses on ordinary Americans through the lens of race, class, and gender to the study of Missouri and its citizens. It accomplishes this task with a collection of essays highlighting Missouri events and their connection to broader themes in recent historiography. This book will be of particular value in a class on the state's history. It comes on the heels of another edited work by the same publisher on the history of women in Missouri. Countering the traditional, political focus of nearly all state history textbooks, such studies will help students see that social history and the story of common people can be engaging and can shed light on themes that have contemporary relevance.

The editor clearly made a concerted effort to include essays touching all geographical regions of the state. In the opening essay exploring Reconstruction politics in Ralls County, Gregg Andrews concludes the Radicals failed locally because of their attempts to ally politically with blacks. The race-baiting used by newspaper editors in the region is shocking to modern readers. Next, editor Thomas M. Spencer's contribution examines the famous Bald Knobber episodes that brought violence to the Ozarks after the Civil War. He sees neither resistance to nor advocacy of modernization as the key to understanding Bald Knobber vigilantism. Instead, he explains the vigilantes' rise in the context of violence perpetuated by the Civil War and believes these groups were bound by regional loyalties and desire for political control.

Both Daniel A. Graft and Deborah J. Henry explore the role of race in labor relations in St. Louis. Graft's essay tells the story of the journeymen tailors' strike of 1835, while Henry surveys the building trades industry after World War II. Their work makes the reader aware that racism has infected unions from the antebellum to the modern era. Essays by Michael J. Steiner and Bonnie Stepenoff deal with the lives of Missouri farmers. Steiner explores reasons why the late-nineteenth-century Populist movement had little appeal to relatively prosperous farmers of northern Missouri. Stepenoff relates the harsh challenges faced by sharecroppers in the Missouri Bootheel in the first half of the twentieth century.

The final three essays chronicle stories of women from across the state. Janice Brandon-Falcone tells the story of the Runcie Club, a women's organization that began in St. Joseph in 1894 and still exists today. Founded by and named for the wife of a local minister, the club gave local women an opportunity to further their education and develop leadership skills. Robert Faust's account of Flat River's early-twentieth-century Mothers' and Patrons' Club shows how women who were in many ways tied to the power structure in the Lead Belt challenged its leaders to make the area safer, healthier, and more supportive of public education. Finally, Amber R. Clifford's study of prostitution in Kansas City details the clash between working-class and middleclass Victorian morals as the city went through its years as a boomtown with the development of railroads and the meatpacking industry.

One shortcoming of the book is that there is only one essay focusing on life in Missouri before the Civil War. There is also nothing on the war itself. Although this is understandable in light of the fact that there is so much literature on the conflict in Missouri, an essay that could go beyond military and political aspects of the struggle and toward a more grassroots approach would have been a welcome addition. Finally, one wonders why the essays were not arranged in chronological order.

But these minor critiques aside, this is without question a valuable addition to the literature on the history of Missouri. Each essay raises important questions, but more importantly, they all point the way toward other studies that scholars can pursue to use local history to bring to life the experiences of all Missourians.

JEFF GALL

Truman State University