St. Louis’s “Satellite Cities”

Excerpted from my book-in-progress, provisionally titled Aliens in the Crucible: St. Louis, Xenophobia, and a 1908 Immigrant Suicide. The book examines the political and cultural effects of turn-of-the-century xenophobia in a city that Walter Johnson calls “the crucible of American history.” In addition to swelling the populations of St. Louis’s riverside industrial neighborhoods, immigrants increasingly…