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WORK TITLE: St. Louis Rising
WORK NOTES: with Carl J. Ekberg
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Saint Louis
STATE: MO
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/53tkw6ps9780252038976.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:University of Missouri-St. Louis, M.A. (history), 2007; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, M.A. (teaching English as a second langauge).
ADDRESS
CAREER
St. Louis Community College, professor of English as a Second Language.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Carl J. Ekberg and Sharon K. Person have collaborated on the historical academic book St. Louis Rising: The French Regime of Louis St. Ange de Bellerive, which tells an alternative version of St. Louis’ founding. Born in 1938, Ekberg is a historian and writer, and is professor emeritus of history at Illinois State University. He specializes in Upper Louisiana in colonial times before Lewis and Clark arrived in the Mississippi River Valley. Ekberg has published numerous books on French settlement in Illinois and the Mississippi frontier, including French Roots in the Illinois Country: The Mississippi Frontier in Colonial Times, which discusses Illinois country, populated by French Creole communities, as having its own ethnic, economic, and cultural identity. Ekberg presents unique social and agrarian practices including medieval-style open-field farming, flour trade between Illinois and New Orleans, and different values between French Creoles and Anglo-Americans. He also wrote the award-winning Colonial Ste. Genevieve: An Adventure on the Mississippi Frontier in 2014. The book explores colonial life in the old French frontier town located south of St. Louis. Ste. Genevieve was populated by French Creoles and American Indians in the Mississippi Valley.
Based in St. Louis, Missouri, Person is a professor of English specializing in English as a Second Language at St. Louis Community College. She holds a master’s degree in history from the University of Missouri-St. Louis and a master’s degree in teaching English as a second language from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. In 2010, she published Standing Up for Indians: Baptism Registers as an Untapped Source for Multicultural Relations in St. Louis, 1766-1821, which utilizes baptism records to document the persistence of Indian slavery in early St. Louis. She also discusses the prevalence of interbreeding between French, American, African American, and Native people at the time.
Ekberg published the 2007 Stealing Indian Women: Native Slavery in the Illinois Country. The book draws on original source material and colonial depositions from America, France, and Spain to detail slavery of Indian women who were captives of Illinois tribes and the role of a mixed-blood woodsman named Céladon in race and gender relations. Writing in Journal of Southern History, F. Todd Smith commented that Ekberg completes his study of the region by “providing a much fuller understanding of colonial life in the upper Mississippi Valley.”
In 2015, Ekberg and Person collaborated on St. Louis Rising, in which they use new source materials and archival documents to correct history and place less emphasis on the roles of fur traders Pierre Laclède and Auguste Chouteau in the founding of St. Louis and more focus on French government officials at the settlement and military commandant Louis St. Ange de Bellerive for shaping early city society. The authors trace the history of the area from the first arrival of the French on the Mississippi. “Ekberg and Person’s thorough, well-researched monograph illustrates a more complete picture of the settlement of St. Louis than previously available,” declared M.W. Quirk in Choice.
The authors also describe how in Illinois country in the 1776 census, widows were considered heads of households, which highlights the roles of women in addition to the famous Madame Chouteau. Writing in Michigan’s Habitant Heritage, reviewer Suzanne Boivin Sommerville remarked: “This emphasis on individuals and families is a welcome feature throughout the book, enabling readers to see day to day lives in the settlements on the Mississippi River.” Although decrying the lack of attention to the region’s Native people in the book, Jacob F. Lee commented in Journal of Southern History, “Like Ekberg’s best work, St. Louis Rising combines exhaustive research in French-language sources with a detailed understanding of colonial society in the Illinois Country to challenge received wisdom and misconceptions about the region.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, October, 2015. M.W. Quirk, review of St. Louis Rising: The French Regime of Louis St. Ange de Bellerive, p. 307.
Journal of Southern History, 2016, Jacob F. Lee, review of St. Louis Rising, p. 656.
ONLINE
Illinois Authors Web site, http://www.illinoisauthors.org/ (March 1, 2017), biography of Carl Ekberg.
Michigan’s Habitant Heritage, http://habitantheritage.org (March 20, 2017), review of St. Louis Rising.*
Sharon Person is a professor of English specializing in English as a Second Language at St. Louis Community College, St. Louis Missouri.
LC control no.: no2010092715
Personal name heading:
Person, Sharon
Found in: Standing up for Indians, c2010: t.p. (Sharon Person) p. 145
(M.A., history, Univ. of Missouri-St. Louis, 2007; M.A.,
teaching English as a second langauge, Univ. of Ill.,
Urbana-Champaign; professor of English/ESL, St. Louis
Community College)
OCLC, June 7, 2010 (hdg.: Person, Sharon K.; usage: Sharon
K. Person)
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St. Louis Rising: The French Regime of Louis St. Ange de Bellerive
Jacob F. Lee
Journal of Southern History. 82.3 (Aug. 2016): p656.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
St. Louis Rising: The French Regime of Louis St. Ange de Bellerive. By Carl J. Ekberg and Sharon K. Person. (Urbana and other cities: University of Illinois Press, 2015. Pp. [xvi], 326. Paper, $29.00, ISBN 978-0-252-08061-6; cloth, $95.00, ISBN 978-0-252-03897-6.)
In 1804 fur trader Auguste Chouteau penned a famous narrative of the establishment of St. Louis, which, according to Chouteau, he and his stepfather, Pierre Laclede Liguest, had cofounded forty years earlier. With great foresight, Laclede and the teenage Chouteau identified a prime location, cleared and surveyed the land, and set the city on its course to become the hub of the Missouri River fur trade. In St. Louis Rising: The French Regime of Louis St. Ange de Bellerive, Carl J. Ekberg and Sharon K. Person argue that Chouteau's reminiscences were an exercise more in mythmaking and self-promotion than in history. Moving beyond Chouteau's oft-cited account, Ekberg and Person tell a richer story of St. Louis's founding and its emergence as the commercial center of Middle America.
Divided into two halves, St. Louis Rising is a study of the Grotton-St. Ange family in the Illinois Country from 1720 to 1770 and a social history of early St. Louis. In the first part, Ekberg and Person document the careers of French officer Robert Grotton-St. Ange and his son, Louis St. Ange de Bellerive, two of the most capable and longest-tenured French officials in the Illinois Country. In 1765 the son transferred the Illinois Country to Great Britain and then administered St. Louis until Spain took possession in 1770. The second half provides an in-depth look at early St. Louis with thematic chapters on architecture, law, slavery, material culture, and the fur trade. Most histories of St. Louis emphasize the centrality of the fur trade to the town's founding and growth, but drawing on underused St. Louis notarial archives, Ekberg and Person uncover the world that existed beyond the commerce in peltries. Particularly compelling is their analysis of the effects of the Coutume de Paris on social life and business endeavors in St. Louis.
Like Ekberg's best work, St. Louis Rising combines exhaustive research in French-language sources with a detailed understanding of colonial society in the Illinois Country to challenge received wisdom and misconceptions about the region. In highlighting the Grotton-St. Ange family, Ekberg and Person demonstrate the importance of two little-known officials. Additionally, the authors provide a skilled examination of the everyday life of French colonists in early St. Louis. The book reveals an orderly colony that was governed according to French laws and customs. It was a far cry from the stereotypical lawless frontier outpost.
Unfortunately, Ekberg and Person fail to apply the same level of acuity to the region's Native peoples. In this book, Indian nations serve as little more than pawns in an imperial struggle between France and Great Britain. Rather than pursuing their own ambitions and interests, in this analysis Native nations were merely "provoked," "sometimes led," and "incited by" Europeans (pp. 30, 40, 69). Recent scholarship has shown the array of factors that influenced Native decisions and actions, but those insights are absent here. Additionally, beyond enslaved Indians living in colonial households, Native peoples are largely missing from Ekberg and Person's exploration of early life in St. Louis. Indians from throughout the region regularly visited the town for commercial and diplomatic purposes. A town of Peoria Indians even sat across a small stream from the fledgling village. These and other Indians rarely appear in St. Louis Rising, which instead depicts St. Louis as "the most thoroughly French community in the Mississippi River valley" (p. 217). These omissions diminish the overall success of St. Louis Rising, but anyone interested in the Illinois Country or early St. Louis will find much of value in this book.
JACOB F. LEE
Indiana University, Bloomington
Lee, Jacob F.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Lee, Jacob F. "St. Louis Rising: The French Regime of Louis St. Ange de Bellerive." Journal of Southern History, vol. 82, no. 3, 2016, p. 656+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460447759&it=r&asid=8bef81d70b16e05996ae8aacd95e6e68. Accessed 24 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460447759
Ekberg, Carl J.: St. Louis rising: the French regime of Louis St. Ange de Bellerive
M.W. Quirk
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.2 (Oct. 2015): p307.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Ekberg, Carl J. St. Louis rising: the French regime of Louis St. Ange de Bellerive, by Carl J. Ekberg and Sharon K. Person. Illinois, 2015. 326p index afp ISBN 9780252038976 cloth, $95.00; ISBN 9780252080616 pbk, $29.00; ISBN 9780252006938 ebook, contact publisher for price
53-0936
F544
2014-31907
CIP
Ekberg (enter., history, Illinois State Univ.) and Person (English, St. Louis Community College) seek to correct what they see as one of the worst fallacies of scholarship surrounding the settlement of St. Louis--the importance placed on the roles of Pierre Laclede and Auguste Chouteau. For students of historiography, this is a classic scholarly "who done it." Through incredibly thorough archival research, Ekberg and Person are able to paint a more accurate picture of the actions of prominent officials in the settlement of St. Louis. Their research reveals a lesser-known figure in the city's early history, who, according to archival sources, was a central figure in the French settlement: Louis St. Ange de Bellerive, a military commandant responsible for many of the policies and decisions that allowed St. Louis to prosper. As interesting as Bellerive's role are the historiographic decisions, traceable to the early 20th century, that resulted in his diminution in the story of St. Louis's development. Ekberg and Person's thorough, well-researched monograph illustrates a more complete picture of the settlement of St. Louis than previously available. Combined with Robert Michael Morrissey's Empire by Collaboration (2015, Choice review forthcoming), this book marks a significant advancement in the history of French colonization in Illinois. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.--M. W. Quirk, Rock Valley College
Quirk, M.W.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Quirk, M.W. "Ekberg, Carl J.: St. Louis rising: the French regime of Louis St. Ange de Bellerive." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Oct. 2015, p. 307. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA431198523&it=r&asid=57767f0d7accc696a8a2e50c4f52813d. Accessed 24 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A431198523