Books like Antiquities of Central and South-Eastern Missouri — picked by fans

I devoured this book—startling insights and descriptions of pre-Columbian societies.

I study this stuff, and there were many, many things I’ve never heard of, mostly in Central and South America. Like? Like that two of the original cradles of civilization (i.e., Mesopotamia, Egypt, China) were in Mexico and Peru. Huge cities in the Amazon.

We still know far too little about the people that were here before Columbus, their civilizations, engineering, language, and writing. What’s now the U.S. was no wilderness: the forests were managed, the rivers were managed, the prairie was managed. The Americas were heavily settled. They terraformed both continents.

This book blew my mind.

I had no idea there were so many, and such vast, ancient structures throughout mid-America. It showed me how very little I knew about America, and how very wrong the standard American pre-Columbian narrative was.

What's truly sad is that the vast majority of these ancient monuments have been deliberately destroyed. They were an inconvenient truth: that this was not a virgin continent ripe for exploitation but a thoroughly settled land inhabited for thousands of years. We were lied to!

Can I say I love the pictures most of all? I love the pictures. And maps. But 50? Why not 100! 200! (I know why: 50 is a nice round, familiar, patriotic number)

What I loved about this book was that it paid so much attention to Midwestern sites I can, and have, explored – Adena, Hopewell, Mississippian – and many places still on my list. It doesn’t dwell on the cliff dwellings and cities in stone in the west, what most people think of when they think of Indian towns.

And I love that it includes petroglyph and pictographic sites in the West, only a few of which I have visited. So this book is a joy and a torture: all these places I have yet to see! 

I love Chapman.

He might not be the godfather of Missouri archaeology, but he sure was the dean. This was his whole life! This book is by far the most concise, encyclopedic book of ancient Missouri, written in clear language, with great maps by his wife and research partner Eleanor Chapman.

You don’t have to have 14 PhDs and a language translator to read him. He’s an amateur’s dream, and I am very much an amateur! It's impossible to write about ancient Missouri without Chapman; he’s really indispensable, and I lean very heavily on these books, not just as a guide to what was there, but how to think about it, too.

He’s not mystical or magical, like too many American archeologists today. He just reports what he sees as the facts, ma'am. What I found tragic, though, is that a lot of the sites he covers have been deliberately… show more.

This list wouldn’t be complete without a story about a journalist in peril.

Reporter Camille Preaker returns to her hometown to cover the murder of teen girls after she’s been through a tough time herself. As she covers the story and meets some interesting characters, she begins piecing things together, never realizing how close she is to the true danger. 

Camille has had a rough past, which colors her worldview and her judgment. The book explores how grief and trauma aren’t easily overcome and can’t be shelved simply because time has passed and other people have told you to move on.

I love the notion that sometimes danger is much closer than you think. As readers, we care and worry about Camille as she attempts to not just report on this story but also crack the case.

This book was my first Beverly Jenkins novel, and it made me fall in love with her historical romance novels. Before I read it, all the historicals I’d read were Regencies. I was thrilled to find a historical romance with black characters in the United States, which opened my eyes to a part of history I didn’t know much about.

But, the historical aspects were not the only thing that captured my attention. Galen, the Creole hero and free Black man who worked as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, is the reason I recommend this book. There is plenty of chemistry and sensuality between the couple, but his gentleness and love for Hester, a former slave, is unmatched. Galen is one of the best kinds of heroes, and Hester deserves all the love he showers her with. 

One of the best Henrie O novels, I love it that this takes place within the hallowed halls of the academia at the fictitious Thorndyke University, where the sixty-something journalism professor-turned sleuth encourages an ambitious student to dig up the dirt on three unsolved local crimes. Of course, the student gets killed, and against the wishes of the police and the powers-that-be Henrie O gets involved, dredging up a past everyone wants to keep buried. I now realize that not knowingly, but at a subconscious level, this novel inspired me to write mine!

I love Lidie Newton. She is a newlywed who accompanies her abolitionist husband from Illinois to Kansas Territory, at a time when the territory is mired in partisan rage and violence. Lidie narrates the story, and her straightforward, often insightful accounts pulled me in immediately. I was right there with her as she forged her way through numerous exploits, some humorous, others heart-breaking. The story is populated with characters who are both colorful and believable, and I came away with a heightened understanding of the role played by events in Kansas and Missouri during the frightening months leading up to the Civil War.

Street Justice is a terrific ethnography on an issue too seldom talked about in criminal justice textbooks, namely, payback in the context of drug dealing.

Jacobs and Wright did not set out here for any new philosophical insights about revenge. Instead, they are interested in its reality. What emerges from this study is a stark catalog of how retaliation actually works, among real people, in a real American city, and what a chilling picture it is.

Based on interviews with actual St. Louis offenders who related their personal experiences with loss, pain, humiliation, and anger, Street Justice is an eye-opener even for those of us who thought we knew something about this topic.

Read this book if you a cop. If you are just interested in law and violence, as I am, read this one alongside Miller, Gould, and a few of the Icelandic Sagas, and I guarantee you will… show more.

Let’s face it. Christianity has been used to support slavery, encourage white people to be racist, and send women back to the 1950s.

That’s why I found Jarod Roll’s Spirit of Rebellion refreshing and important. It was a good reminder that faith can also provide the moral courage necessary for change. It can unite people instead of dividing them.

I can’t imagine a place and time more disposed to racist divisions than rural Missouri in the late 19th century. Yet, poor white and Black farmers there found common ground as rebels against the emerging capitalist order. How? Through the Pentecostal revivals that swept the region in this same period. If that’s not a message of hope in these trying times, then I don’t know what is.