Under Three Flags: The Roots Of Education In Illinois


Book Description

Under Three Flags; The Roots of Education in Illinois was transplanted by the first missionary explorer Jesuits who traversed the 17th century Illinois wilderness from the mouth of the Mississippi to the Great Lakes and terminating in Quebec Canada. The Jesuits founded an agricultural college before 1720. They experimented quite successfully with botany and animal husbandry. They developed and refined a French gaited carriage pony which was mistaken for a Hackney by coureur des bois and voyageur alike. Early American heroes such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and George Rogers Clarke among others are discussed with surprising revelations such as the only capture and surrender of George Washington to a group from Fort des Charters, Prairie du Rocher and Kaskaskia. While some Indians were hostile by reputation and actions; others tribes befriended the French and Jesuit explorers treating them as their brothers. The Illinois Confederacy consisting of the five tribes were the first Americans in Illinois.










Under Three Flags


Book Description

A history of St. Louis that begins in prehistoric times and continues through the Louisiana Purchase.













History as They Lived It


Book Description

“History as They Lived It deserves to be placed within the rich context of Illinois Country historiography going back more than a century. . . . It brings together the fully ripened thoughts of a mature scholar at the very moment that students of the Illinois Country need such a book.”—from the foreword by Carl J. Ekberg Settled in 1722, Prairie du Rocher was at the geographic center of a French colony in the Mississippi Valley, which also included other villages in what is now Illinois and Missouri: Cahokia, Kaskaskia, Fort de Chartres, St. Philippe, Ste. Genevieve, and St. Louis. Located in an alluvial valley near towering limestone bluffs, which inspired the village’s name—French for “prairie of the rock”— Prairie du Rocher is the only one of the seven French colonial villages that still exists today as a small compact community. The village of Prairie du Rocher endured governance by France, Great Britain, Virginia, and the Illinois territory before Illinois became a state in 1818. Despite these changes, the villagers persisted in maintaining the community and its values. Margaret Kimball Brown looks at one of the oldest towns in the region through the lenses of history and anthropology, utilizing extensive research in archives and public records to give historians, anthropologists, and general readers a lively depiction of this small community and its people.