Includes reports of the heads of the various municipal departments.

Includes reports of the heads of the various municipal departments.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Beyond the Movie Theater excavates the history of non-theatrical cinema before 1920, exploring where and how moving pictures of the 1910s were used in ways distinct from and often alternative to typical theatrical cinema. Unlike commercial cinema, non-theatrical cinema was multi-purpose in its uses and multi-sited in where it could be shown, targeted at particular audiences and, in some manner, sponsored. Relying on contemporary print sources and ephemera of the era to articulate how non-theatrical cinema was practiced and understood in the US during the 1910s, historian Gregory A. Waller charts a heterogeneous, fragmentary, and rich field that cannot be explained in terms of a master narrative concerning origin or institutionalization, progress or decline. Uncovering how and where films were put to use beyond the movie theater, this book complicates and expands our understanding of the history of American cinema, underscoring the myriad roles and everyday presence of moving pictures during the early twentieth century.

Shantyboat dwellers and steamboat roustabouts formed an organic part of the cultural landscape of the Mississippi River bottoms during the rise of industrial America and the twilight of steamboat packets from 1875 to 1930. Nevertheless, both groups remain understudied by scholars of the era. Most of what we know about these laborers on the river comes not from the work of historians but from travel accounts, novelists, songwriters, and early film producers. As a result, images of these men and women are laden with nostalgia and minstrelsy. Gregg Andrews’s Shantyboats and Roustabouts uses the waterfront squatter settlements and Black entertainment district near the levee in St. Louis as a window into the world of the river poor in the Mississippi Valley, exploring their daily struggles and experiences and vividly describing people heretofore obscured by classist and racist caricatures.

Founded as a port at the confluence of two great rivers, Kansas City has the waters of the Missouri running through its bloodstream—threading expressways, delivering drinking water, carrying traffic and sewage, and emerging most visibly in the city’s celebrated fountains. Despite, or perhaps because of, the river’s ubiquity, the complex and critical nature of its presence can be hard to understand, which is precisely why Amahia Mallea’s enlightening book is so essential. Moving from the city’s center to the outer limits of the metropolitan area, A River in the City of Fountains offers a clear view of the reach and intricacies of the Missouri River’s connection to life in Kansas City. The history of this connection is one of science and industry working, sometimes at cross-purposes, to bend the river to the needs of commerce and public health. It is a story populated with heroes and villains, visionaries and robber barons, scientists and civil engineers, politicians and activists—all with schemes and plans and far-reaching ideas about what, and whose, demands the power of the Missouri should serve. And so, inevitably, it is a story of disparities: a story of, from one flood to the next, the haves staking out higher ground, leaving the have-nots to the perils of low-lying land. But what the book also shows us is a slow awakening to the ways in which all those vying for the river’s favor are inextricably connected by its course; here we see, finally, a growing awareness of the river’s essential role in the health and welfare of the whole urban environment. In the end, all citizens of Kansas City are both upstream and downstream; all are equally dependent on the health of the river. What this book helps us see is, at last, as much the city in the river as the river in the city.