Kategoria BISAC: History >> United States - State & Local - Midwest(IA,IL,IN,KS,MI,MN,MO,ND,NE,OH,SD,WI

"Authentic history, delightfully told" is the way Ray A. Billington, renowned historian of the Old West, described this collection. David Dary, award-winning chronicler of life on the frontier plains, is at his entertaining best in these thirty-nine episodes, sagas, and tales from Kansas's vigorous, free-spirited past. Many of the stories appeared in Dary's True Tales of the Old-Time Plains, but that book, out of print for several years, focused on the Great Plains in general. This new edition, revised and with additional stories and a new title, pulls together tales about people, animals and...

After northern Wisconsin was cleared by commercial loggers early in the twentieth century, enthusiastic promoters and optimistic settlers envisioned transforming this "cutover" into a land of yeoman farmers. Here thousands of families--mostly immigrants or second-generation Americans--sought to recreate old worlds and build new farms on land that would come to be considered agriculturally worthless. In the end, they succumbed not to drought or soil depletion but to social and political pressures from those who looked askance at their way of life.

Farming the Cutover describes the...

More than fifty years after repeal of the Volstead Act, this nation continues to debate the issues surrounding the use and control of alcohol. While the organized temperance movement in the United States is nearly as old as the nation itself, in no region of the country has the question of liquor control been of more consuming or enduring interest than in Kansas. Until now, however, there has been no broadly interpretive social history that chronicled prohibition in Kansas.

Robert Bader's comprehensive account presents an even-handed analysis of the reform movement and of the role of...

"Rollicking, adventurous, touching" is how American West magazine described David Dary's first collection of stories, True Tales of Old-Time Kansas. This sequel, containing forty-one episodes, sagas, and legends from Kansas's vigorous, free-spirited past, shows Dary again at his entertaining best.

More True Tales is filled with engaging stories of outlaws and lawmen, trailride adventures, buried treasures, natural catastrophes, the famous and the obscure. Sometimes romantic and always colorful, these stories touch on the struggles and hardships encountered by the pioneers as they...

Ignobility stalks Kansas in an urban-centered and media-shaped American culture that tilts toward the coasts. The snubs proliferate. In the movie Vacation Chevy Chase contemplates a stop in Kansas at the House of Mud, "the largest free-standing mud dwelling ever built." A novelist skewers the oft-maligned Kansas landscape, "Love a place like Kansas and you can be content in a garden of raked sand," A poster urges the daring to "ski Kansas," and a New Yorker cartoon depicts a highway sign that announces, "You are entering Kansas, or some state very much like it." In the James Bond film...

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...

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...

When Art Agnos campaigned for mayor of San Francisco in 1987, he articulated and defended the "left" isms--liberalism, environmentalism, and populism. He won.

Seeing Agnos as a defender of slowgrowth vs. progrowth, the city's progressives had high hopes. But to their disappointment, in the wake of the passage of Proposition M--the most restrictive growth control legislation of any large U.S. city--Agnos supported waterfront development and proposals to build a new baseball stadium in China Basin and a large residential and business development in Mission Bay. In 1991 Agnos ran for...

The Cherokees' "Trail of Tears" and the forced migration of other Southern tribes during the 1830s and 1840s were the most notorious consequences of Andrew Jackson's Indian removal policy. Less well known is the fact that many tribes of the Old Northwest territory were also forced to surrender their lands and move west of the Mississippi River.

By 1850, upwards of 10,000 displaced Indians had been settled "permanently" along the wooded streams and rivers of eastern Kansas. Twenty years later only a few hundred--mostly Kickapoos, Potawatomis, Chippewas, Munsees, Iowas, Foxes, and...

Picture a Kansas cattletown. What do you see? Most people see a "Gunsmoke" version of Dodge City--a dusty frontier town full of thirsty cowboys, gunslingers, outlaws, and ladies of the evening.

But the "Gunsmoke" version tells only half the story, according to historian C. Robert Haywood. Two cultures existed simultaneously in Kansas cattle towns, Haywood writes. Alongside the Wild West culture of the cattle trailing industry there existed a highly developed Victorian society, complete with civic activists, churches, boosterism, small-town politics, and Victorian architecture to rival...

When it came to labeling cities, towns, counties, crossroads, mining camps, rivers, forests, peaks, and passes, Colorado place namers looked to an array of sources for ideas. Many simply memorialized themselves and their families--Florence, Howard, Lulu City, Dacono (Daisy, Cora, and Nora combined)--or more well-known honorees--Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Kit Carson, Montezuma, Ouray. Some paid homage to explorers, war heroes, politicians, railroad executives, plants, animals, or landforms. Still others went for the more unusual or creative--Boreas Pass bears the name of the Greek god of...

Four miles southeast of the village of Matfield Green in Chase County, Kansas--the heart of the Flint Hills--lies the abandoned settlement of Thurman. At the turn of the century Thurman was a prosperous farming and ranching settlement with fifty-one households, a post office, two general stores, a blacksmith shop, five schools, and a church. Today, only the ruins of Thurman remain.

Joseph Hickey uses Thurman to explore the settlement form of social organization, which--along with the village, hamlet, and small town--was a dominant feature of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century...

In the wake of the turbulent 1850s, Kansas was popularly portrayed as a Yankee stronghold, a "child of Plymouth Rock" where Puritan virtue triumphed over base Southern ways. Perpetuated by a century and a half of historical propaganda, this fictitious notion tenaciously shrouds the real Kansas.

In Peopling the Plains, James R. Shortridge helps set the record straight. Early Yankee settlers did indeed influence the location of major education and governmental facilities, he shows, but they were only one of many regional and ethnic forces that molded the state's complex cultural and...

Home on the Range chronicles the epic drama of the settling and development of the High Plains, as viewed through the saga of journalist James Dickenson's family and the wheat-farming community of McDonald, Kansas.

With a reporter's sharp eye for detail and human drama, as well as a lucid understanding of the grand sweep of history, Dickenson paints a highly personal portrait of American rural life and its tenacious struggle to survive. By turns lyrical, nostalgic, and unflinchingly realistic, Dickenson weaves a fascinating narrative in which shootouts, lynchings, human chicanery,...

"A few years ago, as I listened one night to my mother telling incidents of her life pioneering in the semi-arid region of Western Kansas, it occurred to me that the picture of that early time was worth drawing and preserving for the future, and that, if this were ever to be done, it must be done soon, before all of the old settlers were gone. This book is the result--an effort to picture that life truly and realistically. It is the story of an energetic and capable girl, the child of German immigrant parents, who at the age of seventeen married a young German farmer, and moved to a homestead...

"A few years ago, as I listened one night to my mother telling incidents of her life pioneering in the semi-arid region of Western Kansas, it occurred to me that the picture of that early time was worth drawing and preserving for the future, and that, if this were ever to be done, it must be done soon, before all of the old settlers were gone. This book is the result--an effort to picture that life truly and realistically. It is the story of an energetic and capable girl, the child of German immigrant parents, who at the age of seventeen married a young German farmer, and moved to a homestead...

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...

Stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to central Canada, North America's great interior grasslands were home to nomadic hunters and semisedentary farmers for almost 11,500 years before the arrival of Euro-American settlers. Pan-continental trade between these hunters and horticulturists helped make the lifeways of Plains Indians among the richest and most colorful of Native Americans.

This volume is the first attempt to synthesize current knowledge on the cultural history of the Great Plains since Wedel's Prehistoric Man on the Great Plains became the standard reference on the subject almost...

By the beginning of the twentieth century, photography had become accessible to average Americans as a means of documenting their lives. Although most people did not yet own cameras, they flocked to commercial photographers for affordable portraits that became the family heirlooms we gape at in wonder today. One of the most accomplished of these photographers was Joseph Judd Pennell of Junction City, Kansas.

Pennell had one of the best equipped studios in the state and took thousands of photographs recording the public life of his town. People from all walks of life posed for his camera,...

In the Civil War, rough-and-tumble St. Louis played a key role as a strategic staging ground for the Union army. A citadel of free labor in a slave state, it also harbored deeply divided loyalties that mirrored those of its troubled nation. Until now, however, the fascinating story of wartime St. Louis has remained largely unchronicled.

By the mid-nineteenth century, St. Louis had become the nation's greatest inland city, providing a "gateway to the West," a riverine crossroads for national commerce, and an ideal base for expansion-minded industrialists from the abolitionist Northeast....