Author : Robert Smith Bader
Publisher :
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 34,56 MB
Release : 1988
Category : History
ISBN :
An interpretative study of the image of Kansas, focusing primarily on the twentieth-century, and looking at how the national reputation of the state has wavered from being renowned for cultural aggressiveness and societal confidence to being perceived as drab and backward.
Author : Robert Smith Bader
Publisher :
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 47,51 MB
Release : 1988
Category : Travel
ISBN :
The tattered image of modern-day Kansas and how it got that way is the subject of this pioneering and wonderfully entertaining book. Robert Smith Bader traces the rise and fall of the state's reputation from the turn of the century--when it was a national leader in the two most prominent sociopolitical movements of the era, Progressivism and prohibition--through the Jazz Age--when Kansas came to epitomize strait-laced, fundamentalist values (H.L. Mencken proclaimed it the quintessential "cow state," chock-full of hayseeds, moralizers, and Methodists)--to today's consensus view of Kansas as drab and boring. The book concludes with a marvelous survey of recent popular culture and with a call for a reexamination of the state's historic strengths.
Author : Fran Grace
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 404 pages
File Size : 32,14 MB
Release : 2001-07-20
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780253108333
Carry A. NationRetelling the Life Fran Grace The story of one of America's most notorious and misunderstood women. Carry Nation was 54 when she "smashed" her first saloon, but her life before she started her infamous hatchet crusade has been little known until now. In this first scholarly biography of Nation, Fran Grace unfolds a story that often contrasts with the image of Nation as "Crazy Carry," a bellicose, blue-nosed, man-hating killjoy. Using newly available archival materials and placing Nation in her various historical and cultural contexts, Grace "retells" the crusader's tumultuous life. Brought up in antebellum Kentucky, Nation lived through the devastation of the Civil War and endured a failed marriage to an alcoholic physician. In her early 20s, a single mother and a destitute widow, she experienced a spiritual crisis. Her second marriage, to a much-older David Nation, grew strained under the failure of their Texas farm, her exploration into Holiness religion, and her attempts to work outside the home. When the couple moved to Kansas, Nation's disappointments translated into an agenda for social reform. Frustrated by the rampant violations of the state's prohibition law and empowered by a sense of divine mission, Nation responded with rocks, crowbars, and hatchets. Though much of her last two decades was spent on stage or in jail and in battles with other family members over the future of her unstable adult daughter, she edited two newspapers and founded several homes for abused and needy women. This complexly woven and delightfully written biography adds depth to the popular image of Carry Nation, situating her at the center of major cultural currents in her time. Fran Grace is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Redlands. Religion in North AmericaCatherine L. Albanese and Stephen J. Stein, editors May 2001400 pages, 57 b&w photos, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, bibl., index, append.cloth 0-253-33846-8 $35.00 s / £26.50
Author : Edward G. Agran
Publisher : University of Arkansas Press
Page : 275 pages
File Size : 21,23 MB
Release : 1999-07-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1610754301
For fifty years, William Allen White, first as a reporter and later as the long-time editor of the Emporia Gazette, wrote of his small town and its Mid-American values. By tailoring his writing to the emerging urban middle class of the early twentieth century, he won his “gospel of Emporia” a nationwide audience and left a lasting impact on he way America defines itself. Investigating White’s life and his extensive writings, Edward Gale Agran explores the dynamic thought of one of America’s best-read and most-respected social commentators. Agran shows clearly how White honed his style and transformed the myth of conquering the western frontier into what became the twentieth-century ideal of community building. Once a confidante of and advisor to Theodore Roosevelt, White addressed, and reflected in his work, all the great social and political oscillations of his time—urbanization and industrialism, populism, and progressivism, isolationism internationalism, Prohibition, and New Deal reform. Again and again, he asked the question “What’s the matter?” about his times and townspeople, then found the middle ground. With great care and discernment, Agran gathers the man strains of White’s messages, demonstrating one writer’s pivotal contribution to our idea of what it means to be an American.
Author : Carolyn Sayler
Publisher : Sunstone Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 20,73 MB
Release : 2011-11-01
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1611390370
"She was my idol," said columnist Mary McGrory. McGrory, in writing of women, referred to Doris Fleeson as "incomparably the first political journalist of her time." Fleeson was, in fact, the first woman in the United States to become a nationally syndicated political columnist. In 1945, with the encouragement of Henry Mencken, she launched her column. In her career she would write some 5,500 columns during the next twenty-two years. Fleeson's appearance could be disarming. Once at a party Lady Bird Johnson exclaimed, "What a gorgeous dress, Doris. It makes you look just like a sweet, old-fashioned girl." The wife of Senator Stuart Symington interjected, "Yes, just a sweet old-fashioned girl with a shiv in her hand." CAROLYN SAYLER lives in Lyons, Kansas, ten miles from the town of Sterling where Doris Fleeson was born in 1901. Knowing members of the Fleeson family, she began researching the life of the columnist whose straightforward take on Washington became a daily fix for newspaper readers across the nation. Sayler has a background in journalism as a member of a Kansas newspaper family. She is the author of a history of Manhattan, Kansas, which tells of the town's founding during the Free State struggle, its strong connections with New England, and its abolitionist college, now Kansas State University.
Author : Paul R. Petersen
Publisher : Pelican Publishing Company, Inc.
Page : 388 pages
File Size : 30,37 MB
Release : 2011-04-26
Category : History
ISBN : 9781589809093
The Lawrence raid of August 21, 1863, was considered one of the bloodiest events of the Civil War. The actions that brought on the raid are researched and explored in depth here for the very first time. What is discovered is a collusion in a "legacy of lies" that surrounded the stories of the raid.
Author : David M. Wrobel
Publisher :
Page : 408 pages
File Size : 35,7 MB
Release : 1997
Category : History
ISBN :
What does it mean to live in the West today? Do people tend to identify with states, with regions, or with the larger West? This book examines the development of regional identity in the American West, demonstrating that it is a regionally diverse entity made up of many different wests--Great Plains, Southwest, Rocky Mountains, and more--in which American regionalism finds its fullest expression. These fourteen original essays tell how a sense of place emerged among residents of various regions and how a sense of those places was developed by people outside of them. Wrobel and Steiner first offer a compelling overview of the West's regional nature; then thirteen other rising or renowned scholars-from history, American Studies, geography, and literature-tell how regional consciousness formed among inhabitants of particular regions. All of the essays address the larger issue of the centrality of place in determining social and cultural forms and individual and collective identities. Some focus on race and culture as the primary influences on regional consciousness while others emphasize environmental and economic factors or the influence of literature. Some even examine western regionalism in areas that lie beyond the West as it has traditionally been conceived. Each of the contributors believes that where a people live helps determine what they are, and they write not only about the many wests within the larger West, but also about the constant state of flux in which regionalism exists. Many books speak of the West as a place, but few others deal with the West's different places. Many Wests presents a vision of the West that reflects both the common heritage and unique character of each major subregion, building on the revisionist impulse of the last decade to help redirect New Western History toward an appreciation of regional diversity and integrate scholarship in the regional subfields. It is a book for everyone who lives in, studies, or loves the West, for it confirms that it is home to very different peoples, economies, histories-and regions.
Author : Sterling D. Evans
Publisher : Texas A&M University Press
Page : 342 pages
File Size : 50,30 MB
Release : 2013-01-14
Category : History
ISBN : 1622880013
Before the invention of the combine, the binder was an essential harvesting implement that cut grain and bound the stalks in bundles tied with twine that could then be hand-gathered into shocks for threshing. Hundreds of thousands of farmers across the United States and Canada relied on binders and the twine required for the machine’s operation. Implement manufacturers discovered that the best binder twine was made from henequen and sisal—spiny, fibrous plants native to the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. The double dependency that subsequently developed between Mexico and the Great Plains of the United States and Canada affected the agriculture, ecology, and economy of all three nations in ways that have historically been little understood. These interlocking dependencies—identified by author Sterling Evans as the “henequen-wheat complex”—initiated or furthered major ecological, social, and political changes in each of these agricultural regions. Drawing on extensive archival work as well as the existing secondary literature, Evans has woven an intricate story that will change our understanding of the complex, transnational history of the North American continent.
Author : James Warren Oberly
Publisher : Manchester University Press
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 14,28 MB
Release : 1995
Category : History
ISBN : 9780719036880
Author : Bill Kauffman
Publisher : Chelsea Green Publishing
Page : 322 pages
File Size : 25,64 MB
Release : 2010-07-10
Category : History
ISBN : 1933392800
This book "traces the historical roots of the secessionist spirit, and introduces us to the often radical, sometimes quixotic, and highly charged movements that want to decentralize and re-localize power"--P. [4] of cover.
