French St. Louis: Landscape, Contexts, and Legacy

Abstract

Since her interring in the Pantheon in Paris, where “great men” of the nation lie, no one personifies French St. Louis more aptly perhaps than native daughter and subsequent singer, French citizen, and Résistante Josephine Baker. Although “many of the dwindling remnants of St. Louis's past, of any era, fell to the wrecker's ball,” the Gateway City's French age has not entirely disappeared from record, argues Robert J. Moore Jr. (p. 193). A group of historians, fortuitously, coordinated efforts to recollect parts of the French heritage of the city (founded in 1764). St. Louis, the other French city on the Mississippi River, lies nearly seven hundred miles north of New Orleans. French St. Louis explores, as Robert Englebert describes them, the “creole transcolonial networks” between and beyond these two port cities, each of which developed distinctly despite their shared trajectories (p. 41). Beginning at the symbolic and actual gate to the American frontier, the contributors direct readers' gaze toward individual actors, items, and ideas coalescing along the tributaries of the Mississippi Valley. The editors ask themselves how such a wide lens might sit with residents of the contemporary metropolis.