Missouri

Name: Missouri Outlaws
Brand: Paul Kirkman
SKU: 9781625859150
Price: 23.99 USD
Availability: InStock

Taking its cue from St. Louis architecture, the Show Me State operates as a gateway to discovery. The wonders of the 1904 World’s Fair, the scenic passage of Route 66 and the quest for that perfect meal in Columbia all testify to that exploratory drive. But like the restless rivers that gave Mark Twain his alias and inspiration, Missouri’s history proves no frontier provides uncontested passage. In the vicinity of Civil War guerillas or Prohibition Era bootleggers, an unlocked door could invite calamity. Crack open our catalogue of Missouri history books for a portal into the state’s adventurous heritage. [View all Missouri books]

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Missouri Outlaws

Paperback

$23.99

Murder & Mayhem in Missouri

Paperback

$21.99

Missouri's Mad Doctor McDowell

Missouri Outlaws

9781625859150

$23.99

Whether seen as a common criminal or Robin Hood with a six-shooter, the Missouri outlaw left an indelible mark on American culture. In the nineteenth century, Missouri was known as the "Outlaw State" and offered a list of lawbreakers like Jesse James, Bloody Bill Anderson, Belle Starr and Cole Younger. These notorious criminals became folk legends in countless books, movies and television shows. Author Paul Kirkman traces the succession of Missouri's first few generations and how each contributed to the making of some of the most notorious outlaws and lawmen in American history.

Murder & Mayhem in Missouri

9781626190337

$21.99

Desperadoes like Frank and Jesse James earned Missouri the nickname of the Outlaw State after the Civil War, and that reputation followed the region into the Prohibition era through the feverish criminal activity of Bonnie and Clyde, the Barkers and Charles Pretty Boy Floyd. Duck into the Slicker War of the 1840s, a vigilante movement that devolved into a lingering feud in which the two sides sometimes meted out whippings, called slickings, on each other. Or witness the Kansas City Massacre of 1933, a shootout between law enforcement officers and criminal gang members who were trying to free Frank Nash, a notorious gang leader being escorted to federal prison. Follow Larry Wood through the most shameful and savage portion of the Show-Me State's history.

Missouri's Mad Doctor McDowell

9781467118880

$21.99

Body snatcher. Grave robber. Mad scientist. Brilliant surgeon. Delve into the macabre world of St. Louis's Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell, a man so loathed by the public that he wore body armor and so idolized by his anatomy students that they dug up corpses for his experiments. This ghoulish doctor cast a pall over the city and left a host of fiendish mysteries. Did his mother's ghost actually help him escape an angry mob? Did he really hang the corpse of his daughter in Hannibal's Mark Twain Cave? What very real horrors remained in his medical college after loyal Unionists drove him out? Dissect a life surrounded by speculation and a legend littered with ghosts.

Wicked Branson

9781467137119

$21.99

Branson's wholesome brand of entertainment made it the nation's destination for family fun, but the vacation wonderland can't claim a spotless past. Murder and mischief dogged the town's efforts at respectability from the very beginning. The founder's own brother, Galba Branson, was a prominent member of the notorious vigilante gang the Bald Knobbers. He died in a picnic shootout that originated in a church prank. Branson's transformation into a showbiz mecca brought quarrel and scandal in its wake, from provoked orangutans to wire-tapped dressing rooms. Three comedians and authors—Ed and Karen Underwood and John Pinney—offer this backstage pass to the seamier side of Branson's history.