'Rollicking, adventurous, touching. Whether the reader invests only a few minutes at a time or finishes the book at one sitting, he is in for a lot of fun.' - American West'Fascinating tales set down succinctly and excitingly. There are stories of lost treasure and sudden riches, of outlaws and sheriffs, of massacres and heroics.' - Kansas City Times'A fun book. Where else but in the frontier West were such stories really lived?' - Richard Bartlett, author of Great Surveys of the American West and The New Country: A Social History of the American Frontier

This colorful history of pioneer life in Arizona sheds light on the experiences of the homesteader families who founded the Kansas Settlement. In 1909, fifteen families left their homes in Kansas to claim homesteads a thousand miles away in a remote region of the Arizona Territory. In this beautiful but unforgiving new home, they would realize their dream of owning their own land. They named their new community Kansas Settlement. Those who persevered met the challenges, raised their families, and prospered. Their determination was inspiring and left a legacy of courage. In One Hundred Sixty Acres of Dirt, author Marsha Arzberger tells the tales of these remarkable people—farmers, cowboys, pioneer women, and schoolmarms—drawn from personal journals and family scrapbooks. A descendent of one of the original Kansas Settlement families, Arzberger vividly recounts their journey West, as well as their dealings with rustlers, droughts, Apaches, and straying husbands. This carefully researched account captures the daily lives, joys, and tragedies of Arizona’s Kansas Settlement.

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Caxton Press Today, Kansas is a peaceful place. Most residents have forgotten that the state was the scene of some of the most violent incidents in Western history. Legends walked the streets of Kansas during those deadly years: Bill Hickock, the Earp brothers and Clay Allison to name a few. Veteran historian Wayne C. Lee presents the stories of more than sixty incidents, illustrated with almost one hundred photographs.

Meet the mayor of Kansas City as he's called upon to remove the spell of an evil hypnotist. Meet Bottles, the beer guzzling canine, as he makes his way around town on the streetcars. See a tiny Russian prince fall in love, celebrate the birth of the Gypsy King's son, and relive the days of vaudeville and ragtime with these true, whimsical, Vintage Kansas City Stories, taken from the pages of The Kansas City Journal during the years 1907-1909. More than 75 illustrated stories go beyond the history of an American metropolis to tell what it was like to live in an age where old-world people were meeting new technologies, embracing modern thought, and facing a century that promised a world of possibility. Includes a bonus, The Story of Kansas City, the town's early years as seen through the eyes of John Henderson Miller, who moved to Kansas City in 1857 as a small child and grew up as the town was growing, through the Civil War and the birth of the railroads.

In 1821, François Chouteau set up a fur-trading outpost along the Missouri River, bringing the first settlement of Europeans to what would become Kansas City, named after the Kansa tribe of Native Americans who inhabited the area. At the center of a growing nation, the "City on the Bluff" would build and thrive as a river town, a gateway to the West, and a railroad hub, absorbing the influences of pioneers and immigrants traveling through or making it their home. Striving to become "A City Beautiful," its parks and boulevards drew attention from around the world. These are the beginnings of a town carved out of a hillside in the wilderness, transformed into an exciting metropolis that would eventually be called home by Walt Disney, Ernest Hemingway, Jesse James, and many others who left a lasting mark on history.

One of "our most insightful social observers"* cracks the great political mystery of our time: how conservatism, once a marker of class privilege, became the creed of millions of ordinary Americans With his acclaimed wit and acuity, Thomas Frank turns his eye on what he calls the "thirty-year backlash"—the populist revolt against a supposedly liberal establishment. The high point of that backlash is the Republican Party's success in building the most unnatural of alliances: between blue-collar Midwesterners and Wall Street business interests, workers and bosses, populists and right-wingers. In asking "what 's the matter with Kansas?"—how a place famous for its radicalism became one of the most conservative states in the union—Frank, a native Kansan and onetime Republican, seeks to answer some broader American riddles: Why do so many of us vote against our economic interests? Where's the outrage at corporate manipulators? And whatever happened to middle-American progressivism? The questions are urgent as well as provocative. Frank answers them by examining pop conservatism—the bestsellers, the radio talk shows, the vicious political combat—and showing how our long culture wars have left us with an electorate far more concerned with their leaders' "values" and down-home qualities than with their stands on hard questions of policy. A brilliant analysis—and funny to boot—What's the Matter with Kansas? presents a critical assessment of who we are, while telling a remarkable story of how a group of frat boys, lawyers, and CEOs came to convince a nation that they spoke on behalf of the People. *Los Angeles Times

During the Civil War, the western front was the scene of some of that conflictï¿1/2s bloodiest and most barbaric encounters as Union raiders and Confederate guerrillas pursued each other from farm to farm with equal disregard for civilian casualties. Historical accounts of these events overwhelmingly favor the victorious Union standpoint, characterizing the Southern fighters as wanton, unprincipled savages. But in fact, as the author, himself a descendant of Union soldiers, discovered, the bushwhackersï¿1/2 violent reactions were understandable, given the reign of terror they endured as a result of Lincolnï¿1/2s total war in the West. In reexamining many of the long-held historical assumptions about this period, Gilmore discusses President Lincolnï¿1/2s utmost desire to keep Missouri in the Union by any and all means. As early as 1858, Kansan and Union troops carried out unbridled confiscation or destruction of Missouri private property, until the state became known as "the burnt region." These outrages escalated to include martial law throughout Missouri and finally the infamous General Orders Number 11 of September 1863 in which Union general Thomas Ewing, federal commander of the region, ordered the deportation of the entire population of the border counties. It is no wonder that, faced with the loss of their farms and their livelihoods, Missourians struck back with equal force.