Few regions in the United States exhibit a social and spatial fragmentation as extreme as that of the vast flood plain of the East St Louis region. As a coherent geographic interval stretching from the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers down to the confluence with the Kaskaskia River, this flood plain—known to geographers and anthropologists as The American Bottom—is site to the social and spatial aspirations of pre-contact Native Americans, 19th century industrial expansion, 20th century infrastructural consolidation, and 21st century ecological precarity.

Yet this region is currently defined less by its inherent ecological and geological continuities and more by the industrial patterns that have effectively fractured this region into closed parcels of extraction, production, and displacement. It is a territory where the Cahokia Mounds UNESCO heritage site abuts a Superfund site, where French Colonial settlement patterns shape 20th century urban forms, where the first incorporated African-American town in the U.S. abuts the site of this country’s most notorious race riot, and where a powerful Mississippi river flows disconnected from its still-vital flood plane. Through this rather compact region, then, an entire history of North American settlement and aspirations can be told.

The American Bottom Gazette tells the story of this region through an attention to the landscape, communities, and histories of its residents. As much description of a once well-defined geography as it is a recovery of that geography, our goal with the Gazette is to provide a framework for deciphering the irreducible landscape we find today. This publication is available to readers in public libraries, diners, and all kinds of community spaces in between — while also having visibility in the larger St. Louis metro area and beyond. It is our hope that people familiar and unfamiliar with this region alike will find something instructive in this publication. As a specific geography, the American Bottom has seen a history of human settlement, ecological transformation, and social convergence that we find truly singular in the American context. At the same time, as a typical geography, the American Bottom picks up on patterns that might be recognizable at the divided urban periphery of every large American city at the beginning of the 21st century. And it is to both these registers—the specific and the general—that we hope this project speaks.