Between 19 February and 13 August 1915, Zoe Akins, still in the early years of a long and varied writing career that included poetry, fiction, Broadway plays, Hollywood screenplays, and a Pulitzer Prize for drama, wrote a series of twenty-three weekly essays on the new American poetry entitled In the Shadow of Parnassus: A Critical Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry for the prestigious urban weekly, Reedy's Mirror. In this lively, distinctive, intelligent, and wonderfully readable series she reviewed the work of over sixty contemporary poets - Robert Frost, Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edward Arlington Robinson, Ezra Pound, and Sara Teasdale among them - members of a generation of writers whose innovative experiments continue to shape our poetry.

This 230 page atlas is divided into seven parts. Part I, Missouri's Divided Loyalties, and Part II, Missouri's Five Seasons, provide an overview of Missouri's history from the initial settlement of the Louisiana Purchase Territories through the opening years of the American Civil War. The remaining parts cover the Confederate plan, the Confederate movement into Missouri and the Union reaction, the Confederate retreat and Union pursuit into Kansas, and the final Confederate escape back into Arkansas. The atlas has a standard format with the map to left and the narrative to the right. Each narrative closes with two or more primary source vignettes. These vignettes provide an overview of the events shown on the map and discussed in the narrative from the perspective of persons who participated in the events. In most cases there are two vignettes with the first from a person loyal to the Union and the second from a person who supported the southern cause. A few narratives have two or more vignettes from only the Union side. This was done to emphasize disagreements and struggles among senior leaders to establish a common course of action. Map 25, Decision at the Little Blue River, is a good example and the three vignettes emphasize the disagreement between Maj. Gen. Samuel Curtis and his subordinate, Maj. Gen. James Blunt on where to locate the Union defensive line.