| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Bonnie Stepenoff. From French Community to Missouri Town: Ste. Genevieve in the Nineteenth Century. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 2006. Pp. xiii, 232. $29.95.

Any study of a local subject bears a simple risk: aside from local readers, why should others be interested in this topic? Good micro-historiographic work depends not only on the strong and in-depth penetration of the community in question with regard to primary and documentary sources, but also on a legitimate and well-argued linkage to larger patterns or developments that the non-local reader can use to understand other communities and contexts better. Moreover, it should do so in an original way: if such linkages have already been established with regard to similar communities or patterns, the work becomes somewhat redundant and its interest remains almost wholly local. With regard to the history of midwestern towns in the nineteenth century, Susan Grey's The Yankee West: Community Life on the Michigan Frontier (1996) or John Mack Faragher's Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (1986) are especially successful; in a comparative vein, the same might be said of Timothy R. Mahoney's River Towns in the Great West: The Structure of Provincial Urbanization in the American Midwest, 1820–1870 (1990).

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