Kansas Books

During the late 1980's and early 90's, everyone and their dog was writing Kansas books. Once a few regional authors, like Fitzgerald and Buchanan, opened the door with their travel guides, the floodgates did not close for several years. In the midst of all this, there was some good and a lot of bad. This book, I'm glad to report, is among the best. First of all, just to warn the readers, the photographs are all black and white. How unique. Color photography books on Kansas were already done ad nauseum. So why not black and white??? The images are well reproduced, text is to a minimum, and each of the photos must stand on their own right, which they do. Pray has accomplished the task of weeding through what was obviously a lot of photographs to pick the ones that tell the best story. She accomplishes this successfully. Of particular note, the introduction is by regional author Daniel Fitzgerald. It is worth the purchase for that, as Fitzgerald did not write introductions or forewords very often. This is some of his rare writings during his most prolific time period. This book is very hard to find, so good luck. Pick it up when you can. Maybe this volume should be reproduced again!!

Having just finished My Antonia, and wanting to read more about the Prairie I picked this up. It's just as moving. Thank you, Harold Gray.

This is the history of the Butterfield's Overland Despatch (B.O.D) which transported freight and passengers over the Smoky Hill route from Atchison to Denver. It includes maps and photos.

This book really does a fine job with maps and details that can get you onto some the rare publicly accessible rivers in Kansas. Author, Dave Murphy has really put together a fine guide book in a state that has, up to now, not been well known for its rivers.

This is the only one book that can give a complete tour in the mainstream culture of the imagination and its relationship with the power. Even if you hadn't read the theories of Benda, you can enjoy the reading of this one, because is a resume of the position between the power and the intelectuals.

Author Judi Braddy, in her straightforward, personal, and sometimes humorous style, has written a book to help us all find clear direction--and to maintain it when everything around us seems to be conspiring to convince us to veer off in various directions. A must-read for those struggling to find and/or stay the course--and a great reminder for those who feel confident they are already on the right path.

Award-winning historian David Dary presents True Tales of the Prairies & Plains, an anthology of true stories of the Old West gathered from newspaper accounts and little-known published sources. From the legend behind the origin of the word "rawhide", to legends of buried treasure, to the unmitigated roughness of an era when women were scarce and buffalo roamed the plains. A handful of black-and-white photographs illustrate this exciting tell-it-like-it-is collection, enthusiastically recommended for Western buffs.

It's 1877, and young Martha Friesen finds herself on the wide-open plains of Kansas. Her Mennonite family left the Chortitza colony in southern Russia looking for the freedom to worship as they wish, and to follow their pacifist principles. But, the new life in America has introduced some strange new thoughts and temptations. Martha's brother, Jake, dislikes the new farm, and is talking about leaving for the city. And, meeting Indians and non-Mennonite whites, she begins to question some of the assumptions that always seemed so natural.

This is a very nice book. I enjoyed the way the author brought Martha and her family to life, had them react in very realistic ways. Also, I really enjoyed the strong Christian theme that underlies the story. So, if you are interested in the Russian Mennonites, or in the life of frontier-folk, then I highly recommend this book.

I was sorry to reach the end of the book, and wish it were much longer. I think that you will feel the same!

This book was inturiging, and totally worth 5 stars. It made me remember playing on the court with my friends.It made me remember the big ball, dribbiling on the ground, and to think that James Naismith invented it all!

This slender and very concise (194 pages of text, 75+ pages of notes) is a follow-up to Prof. Gibson's fine first book, Interpreting the Founding. In that volume (see my review), Gibson outlined the historigraphical debates about the founding American period (which I define as late 1760s to 1800).
In this book, he goes more to the heart of the subject itself. Gibson's project in these two books is two-fold: What is the best analytical framework to use in examining the founding generation? What can we say that we now know of them after the last fifty years of (often brilliant) historical work? Another way to state this is to say that his project is to point out future directions for research to answer the questions that past work has defined.
Before I discuss his work, I want to baldly state his main conclusion:
Gibson believes that the founders were deontological liberals. They believed that the protection of rights was the central role of government.
They did not believe that government should try to change or form the character of the people.
He centers his discussion around four basic questions or debates. Each of these controversies is covered in his chapters 1 thru 4.
The first is the validity of Beard's thesis of the economic interpretation of the Constitution. In many ways this is the least interesting chapter simply because the necessary data is so incomplete or so seems to point every which way. Let me give you one of my own examples of the latter. Gibson discusses Robert McGuire's fine statistical work on what we know about the delegates to the Constitutional Convention. Gibson states that "McGuire's most important claim...is his proposition that slave-holding made a delegate much less likely to favor a national negative on state laws..."(p. 40). The irony of course is that that national negative was proposed in Resolution 6 of the Virginia Plan, written by one slaveowner and proposed to the Convention by another.
But Gibson's main point is how little we know about the financial holdings not only of the delegates to the Federal Convention, but about the financial holdings of the 1648 delegates to the state ratifying conventions, let alone of the ~160,000 voters who voted in the elections that produced the delegates to the state conventions (p.42) The kind of data required is unlikely to be ever found because it is simply unlikely to ever had existed. Nevertheless, Gibson's summation of the debate leads him to several conclusions. I will quote just one:
"Beard's proposition that the movement for the Constitution was begun by an elite group of men who were disproportionately wealthy, urban, and commercial in their interests, and that they were responding to threats to their economic interests from within the states...is no longer a source of controversy"(p.45)
The second chapter looks at recent debates about how democratic is the Constitution. I loved this chapter because it illustrates the difficulties with a contemporary tendency to place the Founders in the middle of current debates.
The Founders did not regard democracy as a paramount value. In Gibson's words, they "...did not assume that democratic government was good government"(p. 88). Thus we should not be surprised that what they created was not very inclusive nor democratic.
Secondly, there is a tendency to confuse the effects of federalism with anti-democracy. Consider the Senate. Each state has two senators. At the 2000 census, California had ~33,800,000 people. Wyoming has just under 500,000. So you could argue that each Californian senator represents some 15,000,000 people while each Wyoming senator represents 250,000. The difference is a 60-1 ratio. Seems pretty undemocratic depending on how you define "democracy". But the whole point of the Senate was to represents the states qua states; as a corporate political entity. Senators represent their state, not its people.
The final three chapters of Gibson's books I see as being of a piece. In chapter 3 he looks as the historical methodologies of the linguistic contextualists (Pocock, Woods, Skinner) and critiques that methodology from the point of view of those who advocate an "enduring question" approach (some examples of the latter would be Rahe or Zuckert). In chapter 4, Gibson is looking at the compromise that eventually came out of these debates- the multi-tradtion approach. The questions explored by this chapter are what traditions should be included? Is there a core tradition to which the others are adapted?
Gibson's conclusion in these two chapters form the analytical framework that he is suggesting for several future areas of research.
He comes down mostly on the side of those who propose the enduring question approach. Gibson feels that we are to some degree linguistically or culturally constructed but nowhere near to the degree suggested by Skinner, Woods, and Pocock. For these writers even explaining cultural innovation becomes a theoretical difficulty. Gibson (and Rahe and many others) point out that we have no evidence that individuals are that imprisioned by their cultural and linguistic heritage.
Gibson then argues for a multi-tradtion approach that takes the core work of Michael Zuckert and confronts it with the challenge of Rogers Smith work. Zuckert believes that Lockean liberalism is the core tradition of our political founding and that adapted to that core were ideas or means taken from the Portestant tradtion, the English Whig tradition and civic republicanism. But Locke is the key. But Rogers Smith's work can be seen as a challange to that conclusion. Smith believes there are actual intellectual traditions of ascriptive inequality (towards foreigners, women, Black-, Hispanic- and Asian-Americans) that have been used throughout our history to justify the exclusion of those groups from civil and political rights. Can we really say with Zuckert that the core of our political founding is a natural rights philosophy if Smith is right?
Gibson is very impressed by both of these authors (as am I) and wants to work toward exploring the tensions in their interpretations as well as to answer conundrums like the following: The Founders "...did not believe that it was the function of government to promote virtue among the citizens or to foster a particular conception of the good life" (p.157) Yet they believed that such virtue was necessary for the republican government to survive. So how was this virtue to be promoted by the civil society? By church? By schools? By the economic structure of society (Jefferson's nation of yeoman farmers)?
I could go on about this book far longer than I already have. Gibson states the issues so well in so many debates that it really is a spur to further research and reflection even for us amateur readers in the period.
I will leave the summary of chapter five (the lessons of the period for contemporary politics) to your own reading and reflection. I hope I have given you some idea of how impressive both of Prof. Gibson's books are. I recommend them to anyone interested in the period. Anybody who wants to discuss them with me, please feel free to email me or to make comments.