Great Fire at St. Louis, MO, Thursday Night May 17th 1849 alligator reef art From the Plantation to the

From the Plantation to the Senate 1883 traces an arc no antebellum cartographer could have charted — a Reconstruction-era print honoring the improbable distance between the cotton row and the chamber floor

Franz Sigel 19th Century — the German-born Union general rendered in the formal idiom of his adopted republic

printed when the Republic was busy translating its origins into civic furniture: engraved signatures arrayed like relics

issued in the long shadow after Emancipation when Black achievement was catalogued in lithograph as both tribute and argument

The plate reads less like an astronomical lithograph than a confession

Great Fire at St. Louis, MO, Thursday Night May 17th 1849 alligator reef art From the Plantation to theGreat Fire at St. Louis, MO, Thursday Night May 17th 1849 a documentary lithograph of the steamboat White Cloud's blaze devouring the levee, fifteen blocks of a frontier boomtown rendered as inferno on the eve of the cholera summer that would compound the ruin. About the Source Bella Frye sources artifacts from the great American historical archive the Library of Congress, the National Archives, regional historical societies, and the lithographic