Admitted to the Union in 1821 as the 24th state, Missouri is rich with the lore of American history. Within and along its borders flow two great rivers, the Missouri and the Mississippi, which gave birth to two great cities, Kansas City in the west and St. Louis in the east. The state gave the nation Mark Twain, Harry Truman, and Rush Limbaugh. Lewis and Clark embarked on their expedition to the Pacific from St. Louis, which became the Gateway to the West for the settlers who followed.

In Historic Photos of Missouri nearly 200 photographs reproduced in vivid black-and-white, with captions and introductions, show the reader the places, people, and events that helped shape the history of the Show-Me State, from the early decades of photography in the 1870s to recent times in the 1970s. Included in this wide-ranging compendium are vignettes of Ulysses Grant's Hardscrabble, the Gateway Arch, a horse-powered river ferry, cotton pickers in the Bootheel, the 1904 World's Fair, Whiteman Air Force Base, the Lake of the Ozarks, an early Ozark Opry, the St. Louis Browns, the first capitol at Jefferson City, Ste. Genevieve and other towns as they looked in a bygone era, and countless other subjects. This book is your resource of convenience for well-known and not-so-well-known highlights of Missouri history.