Ralph Lewis was born in 1909, and obtained degrees in biology
and entomology from the University of Rochester, New York. In
1935 he came to work for the National Park Service (NPS) as an
assistant curator. He helped plan several park museums and the
museum in the Department of the Interior Building in Washington,
D.C. He served in a year-long Rockefeller internship at the Buffalo
Museum of Science (1937-38), and worked as a historian (interpreter)
at Jefferson National Expansion Memorial (1941-1946). He became
assistant chief of the NPS Museum Branch in 1946, and served as
chief of the Museum Branch from 1954-1964. After the reorganization
of the Museum Branch, Lewis was chief of the Branch of Museum
Operations (1964-1971). After his retirement, Ralph Lewis wrote
the NPS Manual for Museums published in 1976 and produced collection
management plans for seven parks. His book entitled Museum Curatorship
in the National Park Service, 1904-1982, was published in 1993.
The following paper was delivered at Jefferson National Expansion
Memorial in 1943, not at the 2002 symposium, but remains an accurate
and entertaining summation of the sequence of events which resulted
in the Louisiana Purchase.
Jon Kukla
Donald Heidenreich is an Associate Professor of History at
Lindenwood University. He is also Historian (commander) of the
135th Military History Detachment of the Missouri Army National
Guard. He has a BA in History and International Relations from
San Francisco State University, an MA in History from the University
of Arizona, and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
He has written extensively on the Federalists, American jurisprudence
and the early security concerns of our nation as a motivating
factor in the acquisition of Louisiana.
Peter Kastor teaches History and American Culture Studies
at Washington University in St. Louis. His scholarship and his
teaching center on the frontiers of North America, and much of
his work has focused on Louisiana in the years following the Purchase.
His study of Louisiana emerges from his interests in the intersection
of domestic governance, foreign affairs, political culture, and
intercultural contact. His current book project is entitled "An
Apprenticeship to Liberty": The Incorporation of Louisiana
and the Struggle for Nationhood in the Early American Republic,
1803-1820. He is also the editor of an anthology of essays and
documents entitled The Louisiana Purchase and the Emergence of
the American Empire, to be published later this year by Congressional
Quarterly Press.
Larry Cebula is an associate professor of history at Missouri
Southern State College. His Ph.D. is from the College of William
and Mary. His paper this morning is drawn from his forthcoming
University of Nebraka Press book If Their Hearts are Good: Indians
of the Columbia Plateau and the Quest for the White Man’s
Religion, 1600-1850.
Kathleen DuVal is the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil
Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
She is in the process of completing a manuscript tentatively titled
“Warlike Neighbors: The Indian Shaping of the Arkansas River
valley, 1600-1828.” A version of the paper that she presented
at last year’s symposium, which explored the question of
whether Indians and Europeans living in Louisiana could have resisted
the Purchase – the answer was no – will be included
in a special issue of the Arkansas History Quarterly commemorating
the Louisiana Purchase.
Amy Mossett is a member of the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes of
Fort Berthold and lives in New Town, North Dakota. Amy has spent
over a decade researching the life of Sacagawea, as well as researching
the cultural history of the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes. Amy lives
with her daughters in North Dakota where they continue to learn
about their traditional culture and history. They are currently
involved in traditional Hidatsa gardening, wild plant use, basketweaving,
quillworking and pottery. Amy serves as Chairperson of the National
Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Council’s Circle of Tribal Advisors
and is a member of the Council’s Product and Mechandising
Committee. Amy is a graduate of Fort Berthold Community College,
Minot State University and the University of North Dakota. She
is currently the Director of Tourism for the Three Affiliated
Tribes.
Susan Calafate Boyle received her Ph.D in American social
history at the University of Missouri. She currently works for
Rocky Mountain National Park as an Interpretive Planner for the
Cache la Poudre River Corridor, a heritage area in north-central
Colorado. In addition to her interest in the French in the Illinois
Country, she has published a book on the Hispanos merchants on
the Santa Fe Trail and has completed a Cultural Landscape Report
for the White House and President's Park.
Jenny Turner is currently ABD in American history at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison, focusing on western and Native
American history. She thrilled to be out in St. Louis last year
as one of the Missouri Historical Society's research fellows.
Currently a Colonial Dames research fellow, she hopes to complete
her dissertation research this year.
Dr. Denise Wilson grew up a few miles from the French Fort
Ouiatenon in Lafayette, Indiana and developed an interest in regional
French history at a young age. As a teenager she traveled to historic
French sites throughout the Midwest performing as a fifer with
a colonial French fife and drum corps. After earning a Ph.D. in
history at West Virginia University, she taught for several years
at Lakeland College in Wisconsin. She currently teaches history
in a rather unconventional way by performing concerts of historical
music which feature songs of the Midwest’s early French and
American settlers. Denise’s presentation today explores the
reaction of the French villagers in Vincennes, Indiana as American
government officials and lawmakers began the difficult process
of establishing American laws, regulations and the taxes that
go with them. It was a process that was repeated as the American
frontier moved westward with the Louisiana Purchase.
Carl Ekberg received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University and
is well known to people attending this seminar. He is one of the
foremost scholars working today in the field of Colonial Life
in the Midwest. His books include Colonial Ste. Genevieve: An
Adventure on the Mississippi Frontier; French Roots in the Illinois
Country: The Mississippi Frontier in Colonial Times and the forthcoming
Francois Valle and his World: Louisiana before Lewis and Clark.
Martha Saxton teaches American History in the History and
Women and Gender Studies Departments at Amherst College. She did
her graduate work at Columbia after some years as a journalist.
My last book was a biography of Louisa May Alcott. This essay
comes from a book called Being Good: Women's Moral Values in Early
America to be published in January 2003 by Hill and Wang.
María Luisa Pérez-González lives and
works in Seville, Spain, where she is a doctoral candidate assistant
at the Department of American History at the University of Sevilla.
She has a masters degree in history and has completed her coursework
toward a doctorate, both at the University of Sevilla. In 1992
and 1993 she was a graduate student at the University of New Mexico
in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She has conducted
extensive research at the Archivo General de Indias as well as
in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Juan Romero de Terreros was born in Madrid, Spain. He graduated
with a Law degree from the University of Seville and has taken
Doctorate Courses at the University of Madrid. He also has a Master's
Degree in International Studies from the Diplomatic School of
Madrid. As a Spanish diplomat he has served in his nation’s
Embassies in Kuwait, Prague, Paris and Washington D.C. and as
Consul in Lille, France. Presently he is the Head of the Cultural
Office in the Spanish Embassy in Washington D.C. He has written
published essays on the San Saba mission to the Apaches and its
destruction and others on the consolidation of the frontier of
New Spain. He is currently preparing a general study on the missions
to the Lipan Apaches in Texas to be published by the University
of Salamanca in Spain.
Peter S. Onuf is the Thomas Jefferson
Memorial Foundation Professor in the Corcoran Department of History
at the University of Virginia. He specializes in the history of
the early American republic. Educated at Johns Hopkins University,
where he received his Ph.D. in 1973, Onuf taught at Columbia,
Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Southern Methodist University
before going to the University of Virginia in 1990. His recent
book on Thomas Jefferson’s political thought, “Jefferson’s
Empire: The Language of American Nationhood” (U. of Va. Press,
2000, grew out of his earlier studies on the history of American
federalism, foreign policy and political economy. He is currently
working with his brother, political theorist Nicholas G. Onuf,
on the second volume of their collaboration entitled “Federal
Union, Modern World” a history of international law and order
during the 18th and 19th centuries. He is the author of eight
books and editor of six more; five of these books were about Thomas
Jefferson.
W. Raymond Wood was trained at the University of Nebraska
and the University of Oregon where he got his Ph.D. He has taught
anthropology at the University of Missouri – Columbia since
1963. He has been involved in archeological work in each of the
states through which the Missouri River passes. During the past
two decades his work has focused on Lewis and Clark and their
predecessors in exploration, the early cartography of the Missouri
River, and the native Americans that lived along the Missouri,
especially the Mandan Indians in present-day North Dakota.
F. Terry Norris is the District Archeologist for the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers for the St. Louis District. He is a research
associate of the Colonial Studies Program at the Illinois State
Museum in Springfield, and on the Board of Directors of the Cahokia
Mounds World Heritage Site. For more than 30 years Dr. Norris
(Dr. Dirt) has conducted research on a wide variety of prehistoric
and colonial period archeological sites in the central Mississippi
River Valley. The results of those investigations have been published
by several academic presses, including the Smithsonian Institution,
the University of Missouri and the University of Illinois. In
1997 Dr. Norris earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from Saint
Louis University.
Joseph P. Sanchez is superintendent of the Spanish Colonial
Research Center, a partnership between the National Park Service
and the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Prior to his
career with the Park Service, Dr. Sanchez was a professor of Colonial
Latin American history at the University of Arizona, Tucson. He
has also taught at the University of New Mexico, Santa Ana College
in Southern California and at the Universidad Autonoma de Guadalajara
in Mexico. During his career, Dr. Sanchez has conducted research
in 28 different archives in Spain, Mexico and England, and has
published several studies on the Spanish frontiers of California,
Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Alaska. Dr. Sanchez is the author
or editor of seven books and the founder and editor of the Colonial
Latin American Historical Review. In May 2000 he was awarded the
Captain Alonso de Leon medal for historical merit by the Historical
and Geographical Society of Monterrey, Mexico for his many years
of work in Colonial Mexican history.
Rev. William Barnaby Faherty was born in St. Louis 87 years
ago. He has a doctorate in history and has written 27 books. Three
of these books were novels, the rest histories. One of his novels,
“A Wall for San Sebastian” was liberally rethought,
re-written and turned into a motion picture in the 1960s called
“The Guns of San Sebastian,” starring Anthony Quinn
and Charles Bronson. His books have mostly been about St. Louis
history, but he has also written on women’s studies and the
exploration of space. He is Archivist Emeritus of the Missouri
Jesuit Province and Professor Emeritus of history at Saint Louis
University. He currently serves as the director of The Museum
of the Western Jesuit Missions near Florissant, Missouri. He was
honored for the best book of the year by the Missouri Writer’s
Guild in 1964, 1988 and 1990. His latest book is “The Call
of Pope Octavian: A Novel of the 21st Century.”
A native of the St. Louis area, Brian McCutchen holds a
Master of Arts degree in History and Historic Preservation from
Southeast Missouri State University. McCutchen began his National
Park Service career at the Shiloh National Military Park in Tennessee
in 1992. From 1999 to 2001, McCutchen served as park historian
for the Arkansas Post National Memorial. The 300-plus year European
history of the park service unit, as well as the multiple layers
of its settlement, allowed McCutchen to further his studies and
experience in the documentation of historic landscapes. In February
2001, McCutchen accepted a position as a historian with the agency’s
Midwest Regional Office in Omaha, Nebraska. There, he monitors
National Historic Landmark properties, providing guidance and
assistance to owners and stewards of properties with national
significance. His paper this afternoon is entitled “Documenting
a Flowing Landscape: The Cultural Landscape of the Post of Arkansas,
1686 to 1863.”
Elizabeth Gentry Sayad is Co-Chair of the National Committee
for the Bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase. She was the founder
and is now Chairman Emeritus of Les Amis, our region’s French
Colonial Heritage Preservation Group. Last year she delivered
adaptations of this program to the French Senate in Paris, the
Historic New Orleans Collection and the Missouri Historical Society.
She is currently working on a masters degree in American Studies
at Washington University.
