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"Kansas Biography."
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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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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
Thomas Ewing Jr
An Ohio family with roots in the South, the Ewings influenced the course of the Midwest for more than fifty years. Patriarch Thomas Ewing, a former Whig senator and cabinet member who made his fortune as a real estate lawyer, raised four major players in the nation's history—including William Tecumseh \"Cump\" Sherman, taken into the family as a nine-year-old, who went on to marry his foster sister Ellen. Ronald D. Smith now tells of this extraordinary clan that played a role on the national stage through the illustrious career of one of its sons.
In Thomas Ewing Jr.: Frontier Lawyer and Civil War General, Smith introduces us to the Ewing family, little known except among scholars of Sherman, to show that Tom Jr. had a remarkable career of his own: first as a real estate lawyer, judge, soldier, and speculator in Kansas, then as a key figure in national politics. Smith takes readers back to Bleeding Kansas, with its border ruffians and land speculators, reconstructing the rough-and-tumble of its courtrooms to demonstrate that its turmoil was as much about claim-jumping as about slavery. He describes the seat-of-the-pants law practice in which Ewing worked with his brothers Hugh and Charlie and foster brother Cump. He then tells how Tom came to national prominence in the fight over the proslavery Lecompton Constitution, was instrumental in starting up the Union Pacific Railroad, and became the first chief justice of the Kansas Supreme Court.
Ewing obtained a commission in the Union Army—as did his brothers—and raised a regiment that saw significant action in Arkansas and Missouri. After William Quantrill's raid on Lawrence, Kansas, he issued the dramatic General Order No. 11 that expelled residents from sections of western Missouri. Then this confidant of Abraham Lincoln's went on to courageously defend three of the assassination conspirators—including the disingenuous Samuel Mudd—and lobbied the key vote to block the impeachment of Andrew Johnson.
Smith examines Ewing's life in meticulous detail, mining family correspondence for informative quotes and digging deep into legal records to portray lawmaking on the frontier. And while Sherman has been the focus of most previous work on the Ewings, this book fills the gaps in an interlocking family of remarkable people—one that helped shape a nation's development in its courtrooms and business suites. Thomas Ewing Jr.: Frontier Lawyer and Civil War General retells a chapter of Kansas history and opens up a panoramic view of antebellum America, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age.
eBook
Charlatan : America's most dangerous huckster, the man who pursued him, and the age of flimflam
Tells the story of the little-known Dr. John Brinkley and his unquenchable thirst for fame and fortune and Morris Fishbein, a quackbuster extraordinaire who relentlessly pursued the greatest charlatan of the 1920s and 1930s.
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Man of Douglas, man of Lincoln : the political odyssey of James Henry Lane
In 1855, this former Mexican War colonel and Indiana congressman entered Kansas Territory to take a leading role in its quest for statehood, and over the next twelve years he followed a seemingly inconsistent ideological path from pro-Douglas Democrat to Free Stater to pro-Lincoln Republican. His fiery stump speeches and radical ideas won him a Senate seat-along with an army of critics and a cloud that hangs over his reputation to this day. Spurgeon reassesses both Lane's position swings and his role in history, finding a consistency in his ideals that few historians have recognized. He argues that Lane was a steadfast champion of both the Union and his own conception of democratic principles.
eBook
No small potatoes : Junius G. Groves and his kingdom in Kansas
\"The life of Junius G. Groves, a sharecropper in Kansas who grew a modest potato farm into a potato kingdom.\"-- Provided by publisher.
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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.
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Dodge City : Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the wickedest town in the American West
\"Dodge City, Kansas, is a place of legend. The town that started as a small military site exploded with the coming of the railroad, cattle drives, eager miners, settlers, and various entrepreneurs passing through ... Before long, Dodge City's streets were lined with saloons and brothels and its populace was thick with gunmen, horse thieves, and desperadoes ... By the 1870s, Dodge City was known as the most violent and turbulent town in the West. Enter Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson ... The true story of their friendship, romances, gunfights, and adventures, along with the remarkable cast of characters they encountered along the way ... has gone largely untold--lost in the haze of Hollywood films and western fiction--until now\"-- Provided by publisher.
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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