Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Adam Arenson, who is an associate professor of history and the director of the urban studies program at Manhattan College. He is the author of The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War, co-editor of Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States and Frontier Cities: Encounters at the Crossroads of Empire, and co-convener of the Writing History Seminar, and maintains a research blog at http://adamarenson.com. He thanks Megan Kate Nelson, Steve Aron, and the rest of the Civil War Wests contributors for helping him Read more