Kansas Books

I thought I knew all about man's inhumanity, but master writer Cleveland Amory's description of the lifelong crusade that was spurred by his own first experience with the shocking realities changed the way I viewed the theme forever. Thank you, Mr. Amory. We miss your incisive and untiring contributions to this almost hopeless cause.

The Pullman Case is a very well written account of the American Railway Union strike. Despite the seemingly dry material, the author manages to be concise and makes otherwise bland events quite entertaining. I highly recommend this book for gaining an appreciation of the historical underpinnings of the battle between labor and capital in America.

This book is a warm and loving coming of age romance novel about a little girl born to the harsh, puritanical plains of Kansas in the mid-twentieth century. It chronicles the changes she goes through adapting from oppression and extreme poverty while concentrating on the well-being of her own family as it develops. Along the way she meets several fascinating men, but the story does not dwell on all the sordid details of this, rather the focus is more on the conflicts these relationships cause and her own moral dilemma in dealing with them. It is charming and engaging; very hard to put down once you start, but lengthy enough for the vivid descriptions of a Very Big World as seen from the eyes of a smart and determined girl. I loved it.

Terry Thompson made an excellent connection between vintage photographs and quilts that you can create. Her examples are contemporary yet have that old timey feeling.

Ms. Duvall has been writing the Rabbit books, based on traditional Cherokee stories, and her husband Murv Jacob has been illustrating them brilliantly, for a number of years now. One of my friends who visits Tahlequah, Oklahoma annually has been buying these books at Murv's shop each time she hits town. I finally bought one myself from Amazon when my friend sent me to a site where Rabbit Goes to Kansas could be viewed.

In this charming story, clearly Ms. Duvall's original addition to the Rabbit mythos, Rabbit travels to Kansas, meets a settlement of Jayhawks, and brings the sport of basketball back to Oklahoma. Both the story and the artwork are delightful, and, speaking as a KU graduate, I can't imagine a better gift for any Jayhawk.

I highly recommend both Rabbit Goes to Kansas and the other Duvall & Jacob books Amazon offers. Not only are these wonderful books for children, they speak clearly also to the inner child in all of us.

Griffin et. al. present a probing and deep map of the inadequacies and inequities of America's Legal Structures.

I bought this map for a refugee family from Southeast Asia who speak little or no English. Right away they could use it to to find rheir house, their church, and my house. It seems to be reasonably up to date but does not show all the suburbs.

There are several books about art environments, self made worlds, etc. This book is the best if you are looking for contact information regarding the artists and creators and visionaries. The book was created by the team that makes the PBS production by the same name "Rare Visions and Roadside Revelations" And the book is really hard to find at normal book stores. I know people that use this book on a daily basis - tracking down the artists. I like the way the book is written because it does not make fun of its subjects like some other books. It is part travel guide / part art book / part just fun to flip through the pages. ALSO - this is important - this book had places and artists that none of the other books mention. I guess that this is because the authors are on the road traveling the back streets and hunting down their subjects. The photos in the book are also good - not as nice as some big photo book coffed table book - but definetly informative and easy to see.

There are too many choices to choose from if one wants to learn about the Constitutional Convention itself. The interested reader can go to easily obtained copies of Madison's Notes or Farrand's Records if they want to read the original sources.
But if you want to study the state by state process of ratification the sources are few and far between. Even Elliott's Debates which was the classical source for original documents is now very much a collector's item. There is the ongoing publication of the DHRC but it is overwhelming for the casual student.
Robert Rutland wrote an excellent study in 1983, The Ordeal of the Constitution. The bicentennial years of the 1980s saw several collections published including this one.
Scholarly collections are sometimes a mixed bag; I often feel as if I have paid for a whole book for the right to read one to three good essays. But the quality here is universally first rate (with one possible exception).
Since Amazon does not provide us with a table of contents I thought I would provide you with a list of who writes on what state:
Delaware- Gasparo J. Saladino
Pennsylvania- George J. Graham, Jr.
New Jersey- Sara M. Shumer
Georgia- Edward J. Cashin
Connecticut- Donald S. Lutz
Massachusetts- Michael Allen Gillespie
Maryland- Peter S. Onuf
South Carolina- Robert M. Weir
New Hampshire- Jean Yarbrough
Virginia- Lance Banning
New York- Cecil L. Eubanks
North Carolina- Michael Lienesch
Rhode Island- Jack P. Kaminski
The names of Lutz, Onuf, Banning, Lienesch and Kaminski should be known to most any student of the period but the others prove equally adept at placing the ratification debate within the local politics of each state.
In many ways, the debates that occurred during the state conventions set the agenda for the political struggles of the 1790s. And it has to be baldly stated that some of the best political writing and oratory that was done during this period was done during the ratification debates. We owe the fact that we have lived under the constitution for the last two hundred plus years to the actions of James Wilson in Pennsylvania, Samual Adams in Massachusetts, Edmund Randolph in Virginia and Melancton Smith in New York among others. Adam, Randolph and Smith all had doubts about the Constitution and all were able to able express those doubts in ways that caused the Federalists problems. Yet all came to accept the Constitution (for very different reasons) and all eventually took a part in convincing others in their states to do so.
Besides the personalities that loom large during these debates there were individual state issues that enormously effected the way that the Constitution was received in a particular state.
The issue of western land claims (on Indian territory, of course) in Georgia, the issue of slavery in South Carolina and of paper money and debt relief in Rhode Island set the framework for debate. All of this is ably explored by the respective authors on those states.
But I really have to call out for special mention Kaminski's article's on Rhode Island. Even the most casual student of the Confederation period knows that Rhode Island was the national poster child for state misbehavior. And yet Kaminski presents the politics of the states in a way that not only makes sense but also makes clearer to me why debtor relief and paper money advocates were so despised by the Federalists. Basically, Rhode Island just printed up a bunch of paper money and forced creditors to accept it. Over a period of a few years, Rhode Island thus effected an enormous redistribution of wealth in the state. Once its war debts were cleared, Rhode Island then ratified the constitution. The Federal government then assumed the state debts that had supposedly been paid off and made good on them.
This whole course of action was done in the most democratic manner possible and had the broadest possible support of the populace of Rhode Island except, of course, for the "better sort". They had bought out the war debts at very low prices and objected to the people cutting into their profits.
Kaminski's article made me just want to read more about Rhode Island and how their Country party leaders justified all this.
In any case, this book is an excellent adjunct to the one by Rutland. Between the two of them, they allow the lifetime student of American history to really appreciate the importance and the quality of the ratification debates. We have been blessed since the sixties (not to imply anything about the scholarship that came before then) by the quality of the writing and thinking about early American history. This collection is a worthy addition to your Constitutional library.

I read this book for a graduate class in American history. This book is a great compendium of articles which expertly explained the history and growth of the conservative movement in America, and the skill with which Reagan's conservative philosophy transformed the movement. In addition, it correctly observed how America's socio-economic and political institutions had shifted to the right since the Reagan Revolution of 1980. It astutely noted how Bill Clinton, the only Democrat elected to the presidency after Reagan, was not from the typical liberal or Great Society wing of the Democratic Party. After Reagan, it became no great surprise that President Clinton would tell Americans "the era of big government was over."

The book did a superb job in explaining the "intellectual origins" of American conservatism. Essentially, conservatives have a religious orientation to the world around them as opposed to liberals who rely more on the powers of human reason. This view makes conservatives more likely to rely on proven traditions to solve political problems and less likely to put stock into people who rely primarily on using reason and government to solve human problems. "Conservatives expressed concerns about almost any increase in federal power, especially if it came at the expense of local governments or other groups" (42). Underpinning conservative philosophy, was the idea that conservatives had to defend American traditions. One of the conservatives who epitomized this thinking was the economist, and Noble Laureate, Friedrich von Hayek, who in 1944 wrote the book The Road to Serfdom, which warned that New Deal policies would lead to socialism. Hayek's book ended with the argument that conservatives were morally correct in protecting "property rights, and of cultivating a society that allows individuals the freedom to choose with a minimum of government interference" (43). The book observed that the 1950's had brought new issues to the conservative movement to embrace. Whittaker Chambers wrote his anti-Communist manifesto Witness, in which "Chambers so eloquently characterized the struggle with the Soviet Union as a cosmic war between two mutually exclusive faiths, Communism, and freedom" (43). Witness was extremely influential in shaping the conservative movement. Prior to the late 1950's, American conservatism was perceived to be under the influence of elitist country club Northeasterners who were isolationists in their worldviews. Chamber's book and William F. Buckley's founding of the magazine National Review in 1955 set the stage for a fight over control of the Republican Party. Buckley was able to unite an eclectic group of conservatives who ultimately became successful in wrestling the Republican Party away from the traditional Northeastern elitist, which culminated in the nomination of Senator Barry Goldwater for president in 1964. Though the Goldwater candidacy would lose, there were already new forces taking shape in America that would once again transform the Republican Party.

The federally imposed civil rights laws and the civil unrest that swept through America in the 1960's, brought new adherents from diverse backgrounds in the 1970's to transform the Republican Party once again under a "new right" coalition. This coalition was comprised of Southerners who had traditionally been Democrats, but were dissatisfied with government meddling in their lives. Pro-life organizations and the evangelical Christian organizations disappointed in judicial rulings legalizing abortions joined in the coalition. Fiscal conservatives who saw high taxes and spiraling inflation ruining the economy also joined the coalition. Finally, a new group who became known as "neoconservatives" who the book described as, "liberals who reacted to the excesses of the Great Society and the new left liberalism" also joined the coalition (47). This new movement became the new face of the Republican Party, and this time, it had the organization and votes to propel their standard-bearer, Ronald Reagan, to presidential victory in 1980. Hereafter these new Republicans would be known as "Reagan Republicans."

The book has a good grasp on how Reagan's political philosophy was formed. Reagan's mother, the anti-Communist Chambers, and the economist Hayek, all had a profound influence on forming Reagan's religious beliefs and his political philosophy. Reagan's mother filled him with a religion that had "a strong sense of God's providence and of individual destiny" (50). Thus, Reagan envisioned an America that was part of God's master plan, a "shining city on the hill," that would be a beacon of hope for oppressed people throughout the world to emulate. Chamber's writings shaped Reagan's geopolitical outlook. "To defend America was to defend its ideas and its mission" (51). Finally, while Reagan was a well-paid actor in the 1940's he became frustrated with the large amount of taxes he was required to pay. This fact, coupled with his reading of Hayek's work, which warned that liberal "New Deal" economic policies if allowed to go unchecked, would lead to socialism, "shaped his beliefs about the proper role of government in the economy" (51). Upon assuming the presidency, Reagan moved quickly to fulfill his political philosophy. He cut taxes, extended deregulation, moved to terminate or shrink government agencies, and increased defense spending. He also moved to change the face of the federal judiciary to "redress the imbalance of power between the states and the federal government" (54). The book took special interest in observing how the "new right" coalition changed at the end of Reagan's presidency. The neoconservatives wrested power away from traditional conservatives classified as paleoconservatives. Neoconservative power extended to media outlets, think tanks, and some academic institutions. However, paleoconservatives had ample reason to be happy with their achievements, "the center of politics had moved to the right" (54). Economically and politically, government became less of a burden on the lives of Americans, and culturally America moved closer to conservative values.

As a graduate student I recommend this book for anyone interested in Reagan, American History, Cold War History.