Offers a detailed tour behind the facades of 45 Missouri houses, with nearly 300 archival photographs, drawings, and original floor plans.

This interpretation of Missouri's history from the end of World War I until the return of Harry Truman to the state after his presidency describes the turbulent political, economic, and social changes experienced by Missouri's people during those years.

Many Germans who immigrated to America in the nineteenth century settled in the lower Missouri River valley between St. Charles and Boonville, Missouri. In this magnificent book, which includes some six hundred photographs and drawings, Charles van Ravenswaay examines that immigration--who came, how, and why--and surveys the distinctive Missouri-German architecture, art, and crafts produced in the towns or on the farms of the rural counties of Cooper, Cole, Osage, Gasconade, Franklin, Montgomery, Warren, and St. Charles from the 1830s until the closing years of the century. As the immigrants sought to transplant their native culture to the Missouri backwoods, the compromises they were forced to make with conditions in Missouri produced many fascinating and individualistic structures and objects. They built half-timbered, stone, and brick houses and barns with designs reflecting the traditions of the many German regions from which the builders emigrated. The author's far-reaching study of immigrants' arts and crafts included furniture in traditional peasant designs as well as the Biedermeier and eclectic styles, redware and stoneware pottery, textiles, wood and stone carving, metalwares, firearms, baskets, musical instruments, prints, and paintings and identifies craftsmen working in all of these fields. One chapter is devoted to the objects the immigrants brought with them from the Old World. Added to this new printing of The Arts and Architecture of German Settlements in Missouri is a touching and informative introduction by Adolf E. Schroeder. Schroeder's long friendship with Charles van Ravenswaay allows him to reflect on the vast contributions this author made to our knowledge of Missouri's German culture. Everyone interested in architecture, crafts, or Missouriana will find this book indispensable as they savor van Ravenswaay's excellent presentation of the craftsmen and their products against the background of the aspirations and folkways of a distinctive culture.

compiled by workers of the Writers' Program of the Work Projects Administration in the State of Missouri with a new foreword by Charles van Ravenswaay and a new introduction by Howard Wight Marshall and Walter A. Schroeder.

""Maritz & Young built more than a hundred homes in the most affluent neighborhoods of St. Louis. This book features more than two hundred photographs, architectural drawings, and original floor plans of homes built in the early twentieth century"--Provided by publisher"--