Gary R. Kremer – författare

This book strips away the myths surrounding the famed scientist George Washington Carver and portrays him as a brilliant, creative man who nonetheless possessed very human peculiarities and frailties.This insightful work chronicles the life of George Washington Carver, the renowned African American scientist and teacher. George Washington Carver: A Biography begins with a discussion of the political and social circumstances in Missouri where Carver was born into slavery, circa 1864. Readers will follow Carver through his formal education to his decision to accept Booker T. Washington's offer to teach and do research at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.The bulk of the volume focuses on Carver's career at Tuskegee, a career that spanned nearly five decades, from 1896 until Carver's death in January 1943.The book highlights Carver's major achievements, including his championing of crop rotation and the hundreds of products he created from peanuts, sweet potatoes, and other plants native to the South. In addition to Carver the scientist, students will meet Carver the man, who, for example, loved art and painted throughout his life.

Women in Missouri History is an exceptional collection of essays surveying the history of women in the state of Missouri from the period of colonial settlement through the mid-twentieth century. The women featured in these essays come from various ethnic, economic, and racial groups, from both urban and rural areas, and from all over the state. The authors effectively tell these women's stories through biographies and through techniques of social history, allowing the reader to learn not only about the women's lives individually, but also about how groups of ""ordinary"" women shaped the history of the state. The essays in this collection address questions that are at the center of current developments in the field of women's history but are written in a manner that makes them accessible to general readers. Providing an excellent general overview of the history of women in Missouri, this collection makes a valuable contribution to a better understanding of the state's past.

Conceived of as a way to commemorate Missouri’s bicentennial of statehood, this unique work presents the perspective of Gary Kremer, one of the Show-Me State’s foremost historians, as he ponders why history played out as it did over the course of the two centuries since Missouri’s admittance to the Union. In the writing of what is much more than a survey history, Kremer, himself a fifth-generation Missourian, infuses the narrative with his vast knowledge and personal experiences, even as he considers what being a Missourian has meant—across the many years and to this day—to all of the state’s people, and how the forces of history—time, place, race, gender, religion, and class—shaped people and determined their opportunities and choices, in turn creating collective experiences that draw upon the past in an attempt to make sense of the present and plan for the future.  Key elements of the book include the centrality of race to the Missouri experience—from the time Missourians began to seek statehood in 1817 all the way up to the Black Lives Matter movement of the 21st century—as well as ongoing tensions created by the urban-rural divide and struggle to define the proper role of government in society.