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Heartland : a memoir of working hard and being broke in the richest country on earth
During Smarsh's turbulent childhood in Kansas in the '80s and '90s, the forces of cyclical poverty and the country's changing economic policies solidified her family's place among the working poor. Her personal history affirms the corrosive impact intergenerational poverty can have on individuals, families, and communities. Combining memoir with powerful analysis and cultural commentary, this is an uncompromising look at class, identity, and the particular perils of having less in a country known for its excess.
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Creating the Suburban School Advantage
Creating the Suburban School Advantage explains how American suburban school districts gained a competitive edge over their urban counterparts. John L. Rury provides a national overview of the process, focusing on the period between 1950 and 1980, and presents a detailed study of metropolitan Kansas City, a region representative of trends elsewhere.
While big-city districts once were widely seen as superior and attracted families seeking the best educational opportunities for their children, suburban school systems grew rapidly in the post-World War II era as middle-class and more affluent families moved to those communities. As Rury relates, at the same time, economically dislocated African Americans migrated from the South to center-city neighborhoods, testing the capacity of urban institutions. As demographic trends drove this urban-suburban divide, a suburban ethos of localism contributed to the socioeconomic exclusion that became a hallmark of outlying school systems. School districts located wholly or partly within the municipal boundaries of Kansas City, Missouri, make for revealing cases that illuminate our understanding of these national patterns.
As Rury demonstrates, struggles to achieve greater educational equity and desegregation in urban centers contributed to so-called white flight and what Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan considered to be a crisis of urban education in 1965. Despite the often valiant efforts made to serve inner city children and bolster urban school districts, this exodus, Rury cogently argues, created a new metropolitan educational hierarchy-a mirror image of the urban-centric model that had prevailed before World War II. The stubborn perception that suburban schools are superior, based on test scores and budgets, has persisted into the twenty-first century and instantiates today's metropolitan landscape of social, economic, and educational inequality.
eBook
The talent show
After a devastating tornado destroys much of Cape Bluff, Kansas, residents come together as a community to put on a talent show as a fund-raiser.
Book
Skywalks
In 1981 the suspended walkways-or \"skywalks\"-in Kansas City's Hyatt
Regency hotel fell and killed 114 people. It was the deadliest
building collapse in the United States until the fall of New York's
Twin Towers on 9/11. In Skywalks R. Eli Paul follows the
actions of attorney Robert Gordon, an insider to the bitter
litigation that followed. Representing the plaintiffs in a class
action lawsuit against those who designed, built, inspected, owned,
and managed the hotel, Gordon was tenacious in uncovering damaging
facts. He wanted his findings presented before a jury, where his
legal team would assign blame from underlings to corporate
higher-ups, while securing a massive judgment in his clients'
favor. But when the case was settled out from under Gordon, he
turned to another medium to get the truth out: a quixotic book
project that consumed the rest of his life. For a decade the
irascible attorney-turned-writer churned through a succession of
high-powered literary agents, talented ghost writers, and New York
trade publishers. Gordon's resistance to collaboration and
compromise resulted in a controversial but unpublishable
manuscript, \"House of Cards,\" finished long after the public's
interest had waned. His conclusions, still explosive but never
receiving their proper attention, laid the blame for the disaster
largely at the feet of the hotel's owner and Kansas City's most
visible and powerful corporation, Hallmark Cards Inc. Gordon gave
up his lucrative law practice and lived the rest of his life as a
virtual recluse in his mansion in Mission Hills, Kansas. David had
fought Goliath, and to his despair, Goliath had won. Gordon died in
2008 without ever seeing his book published or the full truth told.
Skywalks is a long-overdue corrective, built on a
foundation of untapped historical materials Gordon compiled, as
well as his own unpublished writings.
eBook
Sea monsters : a prehistoric adventure
A young female sea dolly is born in the shallow waters of a prehistoric Kansas Mesozoic-era lake and learns to survive after encountering a variety of predators and other underwater dinosaurs from that ancient time period.
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My Grandfather's Prison
James Patrick Lyons abandoned his family for a life on Kansas City's skid row.A town drunk, he was arrested eighty times for public intoxication.On the night of his last arrest, he was taken to the city jail and held in solitary confinement.The next morning he was dead.
eBook
Violet
\"For many children, the summer of 1988 was filled with sunshine and laughter. But for ten-year-old Kris Barlow, it was her chance to say goodbye to her dying mother. Three decades later, loss returns--her husband killed in a car accident. And so, Kris goes home to the place where she first knew pain--to that summer house overlooking the crystal waters of Lost Lake. It's there that Kris and her eight-year-old daughter will make a stand against grief. BUT a shadow has fallen over the quiet lake town of Pacington, Kansas. Beneath its surface, an evil has grown--and inside that home where Kris Barlow last saw her mother, an old friend awaits her return.\"--Amazon.
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Black Citizen-Soldiers of Kansas 1864-1901
Many Americans know the story of the United States Colored Troops, who broke racial barriers in Civil War combat, and of the \"buffalo soldiers,\" who served in the West after that conflict, but African Americans also served in segregated militia units in twenty-three states. This book tells the story of that experience in Kansas. In addition to black regulars, hundreds of other black militiamen and volunteers from Kansas provided military service from the Civil War until the dawn of the twentieth century. More than a military history, this account records the quest of black men, many of them former slaves, for inclusion in American society. Many came from the bottom of the socioeconomic order and found that as militiamen they could gain respect within their communities.
eBook