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In 1956, the era of tail-finned cars and nineteen-cents-a-gallon gasoline, the Missouri Pacific Railroad emerged on the corporate scene as a private company after twenty-three years in a receivership. In its past lay a collapsed rail empire, a sensational bankruptcy struggle that shattered dreams and betrayed trusts, an emotional battle over stockholders' interests, and the flamboyant maneuvers of the railroad's overseers. In its future lay two computerized, merger-dominated decades in which the railroad business would serve as a classic example of a tradition-bound industry forced to adapt...

Just as the railroad transformed America's economic landscape, it profoundly transfigured its citizens as well. But while there have been many histories of railroads, few have examined the subject as a social and cultural phenomenon. Informed especially by rich research in the nation's newspaper archives, Craig Miner now traces the growth of railroads from their origins in the 1820s to the onset of the Civil War.

In this first social history of the early railroads, Miner reveals how ordinary Americans experienced this innovation at the grass roots, from boosters' dreams of get-rich...

When Kansas became a U.S. territory in 1854 literally all of its land area was guaranteed by treaty to Indians. More than 10,000 Kickapoos, Delawares, Sacs, Foxes, Shawnees, Potawatomis, Kansas, Ottawas, Wyandots, and Osages, not to mention a number of smaller tribes, inhabited Kansas. By 1875 there were only a couple of bands left.

The forced removal of thousands of Indians from eastern Kansas between 1854 and 1871 affected more Indians and occupied more government time than the celebrated exploits of the military against the more warlike western tribes. In this volume Miner and Unrau...

West of Highway 81, there lies another Kansas. While it accounts for two-thirds of the state's land area, it is sparsely populated and nearly desert dry. Before 1940, it was still distinctly rural-a place that some residents called the "Edge of the World."

Several generations of the Miner family have lived and farmed in Ness County, providing Craig Miner with a rich and very personal backdrop for this heartfelt and compelling portrait of western Kansas. In Next Year Country he recounts the resilience of his fellow Kansans through two depressions and the Dust Bowl, showing how the region...

Following the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Kansas Territory was a national issue that dominated America's press, not to mention three sessions of Congress. Hundreds of thousands of articles and editorials--4,500 in the New York Herald alone--were published about Bleeding Kansas during those four tumultuous years leading up to the Lecompton Constitution. Craig Miner now offers the first in-depth study of national media coverage devoted to the beleaguered territory, unearthing new examples of what Americans were saying about Kansas and showing how those words affected the course of...

This volume, which presents a "slice-of-life" on the Plains during its early settlement, adds rich detail to our understanding of the struggle for survival in a harsh landscape that tested the hardiest pioneer. Miner concentrates not only on the major economic events of the period--railroad building, Indian raids, the grasshopper invasion of 1874, the blizzard of 1886--but also on the more personal experiences equally important: building sod houses, choosing crops, filing of claims, fighting varmints, and dealing with the deaths of children on the prairie.

"Magnificent. . . . A subtle and...

Kansas is not only the Sunflower State, it's the very heart of America's heartland. It is a place of extremes in politics as well as climate, where ambitious and energetic people have attempted to put ideals into practice-a state that has come a long way since being identified primarily with John Brown and his exploits.

Craig Miner has written a complete and balanced history of Kansas, capturing the state's colorful past and dynamic present as he depicts the persistence of contrasting images of and attitudes toward the state throughout its 150 years. A work combining serious scholarship...

In 1865, Indian tribes could not know that in just over forty years their greatest natural possession, their tribal lands, would be largely controlled by powerful contenders for their riches, American corporations. Significant as those tangible losses were, the Indian tribes parted with an even more valuable possession, their tribal sovereignty. H. Craig Miner explains that once the large and powerful railway, livestock, coal, and oil companies realized the potential of Indian Territory, they sought to enter the area and utilize its natural resources. The tribes, plagued by a lack of unified...

The semiarid plains of western Kansas and eastern Colorado are hardly the setting for an agricultural empire, but it was here that former field hand John Kriss managed G-K Farms for Wichita entrepreneur Ray Garvey. Their enterprise became one of the largest wheat operations on the plains and yielded Kriss a one million bushel crop.

Harvesting the High Plains is the rags-to-riches story of how Kriss applied hard work and common sense to make large-scale farming work under the most adverse conditions. Drawing on correspondence between Kriss and Garvey, it tells how the two men had to...

Following this colorful Texan through the extraordinary details of his life is more fun than an afternoon at the movies. Like the hero in a Gary Cooper movie, Robert H. Williams marches through the history of the twentieth century on the front lines of American culture. And editor/historian Craig Miner makes certain the reader never wants for a deeper understanding of all that our protagonist experiences.Pairing the original memoir with a lively running commentary rich in historical context and unexpected detail, Joyful Trek guides the reader across the wild prairies of central Texas at the...