Kansas History

Many of the tales capture the romance, excitement, and adventure of the Old West, while others have the tempo of a quiet life surrounded by the immensity of the plains and prairies. There are well-known characters: Bill Cody, the Dalton gang, the Bloody Benders, William Clarke Quantrill, Abraham Lincoln, and Frederic Remington, who once owned a Kansas sheep ranch and later was a silent partner in a Kansas City saloon before he became a well-known artist.

Although Kansas is now high and dry, at one time the state, like most of the Midwest, was under water. Until the land finally rose above sea level during the final years of the Late Cretaceous, the area was covered by a succession of oceans whose geologic record is preserved in the sedimentary rock that covers the Great Plains.

Oceans of Kansas tells the story of the five million years when giant sharks, marine reptiles called mosasaurs, pteranodons, and birds with teeth flourished in and around this shallow sea. The abundant and well-preserved remains of these prehistoric animals were the source of great excitement in the scientific community of the day when they were first discovered in the 1860s. Two of the best-known fossil hunters of the time, E. D. Cope and O. C. Marsh, competed vigorously to recover the best specimens. During the past 130 years, thousands have been collected and sent to museums around the world.

Prominent Kansas historian Virgil Dean has gathered a distinguished team of writers-Thomas Isern, Craig Miner, and others-who have crafted incisive portraits of 27 notable men and women, covering 150 years of Kansas and American history. Here are agitators who moved their fellow citizens to action over political, social, and economic problems: not only John Brown, but also proslavery agitator William H. Russell; Mary Elizabeth Lease, lecturer for the Farmers' Alliance and Populist Party; Gerald B. Winrod, a.k.a. the "Jayhawk Hitler"; and Esther Brown, who challenged segregation in public schools.

Here, too, are motivators, like women's rights activist Clarina I. H. Nichols; William Allen White, the "Sage of Emporia"; and favorite sons Dwight D. Eisenhower and Bob Dole. Then there are the innovators, from trailblazers like Joseph G. McCoy, who changed the face of the cattle industry, and wheat king Theodore C. Henry to Wes Jackson, a pioneer in the sustainable agriculture movement, and the multitalented Gordon Parks, photographer, filmmaker, and author of The Learning Tree.

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 changed dramatically over fifty years-not for the better, some might say.

In this striking regional history, Miner blends the voices of real people with writings of small-town journalists to show life as it was really lived from 1890 to 1940. He has fashioned a richly textured look at determined individuals as they confronted the vagaries of raw Nature and learned to adapt to the machine age. And he captures the drama and vitality of rural and small-town life at a time when children could die in a blizzard on their way home from school, in a place where gaping holes of cellars and wells from abandoned homesteads posed real hazards to nighttime travelers.

No mere nostalgic reverie, Miner's book chronicles the hard challenges to these Kansans' ambitious efforts to create a regional economy and society based on wheat in an area once thought only marginally suitable for cereal crops. His diverse topics include the history of agricultural experiment stations, new approaches to irrigation, and the impact of the tractor and the combine; the role of women's clubs in developing culture, the growth of higher education, and the rise of the secession movement; and how people responded to pests, from prairie dogs to grasshoppers, and to radical groups, from the IWW to the KKK.

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 with great readability, it encompasses everything from the Kansas-Nebraska Act to the evolution-creationism controversy, emphasizing the historical moments that were pivotal in forming the culture of the state and the diverse group of people who have contributed to its history.

This is the first new state history to appear in over twenty-five years. Written to enlighten general readers within and well beyond the state's borders, it offers coverage not found in previous histories: greater attention to its cities--notably Wichita--and to its south central and western regions, accounts of business history, contributions of women and minorities, and environmental concerns. It presents the dark as well as the bright side of Kansas progressivism and is the first Kansas history to deal with the post-World War II era in any significant detail.

Craig Miner has spent almost forty years researching, teaching, and writing Kansas history and has dug deeply into primary sources. That research has enabled him to assemble a wider cast of characters and more entertaining collection of quotations than found in earlier histories and to better show how individual initiative and entrepreneurial aspirations have profoundly influenced the creation of present-day Kansas.

Ghost Towns of Kansas is a practical guide to these forsaken settlements and a chronicle of their role in the history of Kansas. It focuses on 100 towns that have either disappeared without a trace or are only "a shadowy remnant of what they once were," telling the story of each town's settlement, politics, colorful figures and legends, and eventual abandonment or decline.

The culmination of more than ten years of research, this new book is a distillation of the author's immensely popular three-volume work on the state's ghost towns, now out of print. Condensed and redesigned as a traveler's guide, it is organized by region and features ten maps and detailed instructions for finding each site. Twenty of the towns included are discussed for the first time in this volume. The book also contains more than 100 black-and-white photographs of town scenes.