After months of intense debate, Congress finally passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act on May 30, 1854, largely along sectional lines. Over the next several years Kansas Territory became "Bleeding Kansas" as violence erupted between pro-slavery and free-state factions. While scholars continue to debate the true causes of the fighting in Kansas,…

This article is divided into three parts. The first examines specific fencing policies in Kansas, Nebraska, and other Plains states, highlighting the transformation from the "fence-out" to "fence-in" (herd laws) policies. The second part discusses the coming of the railroads to the Great Plains and the farmers and the ranchers…

The Jewish experience in Wichita, Kansas, highlights the ongoing challenge of being Jewish in the Midwest. Ever since the mid-nineteenth century, Jewish life in the middle part of the country was quite different from that in cities like New York, which contained the largest concentration of Jewish Americans, and which has attracted most of the…

In the spring of 1540, Francisco Vazquez de Coronado led an "entrada" from present-day Mexico into the region we call New Mexico, where the expedition spent a violent winter among pueblo peoples. The following year, after a long march across the Great Plains, Coronado led an elite group of his men north into present-day Kansas where,…

Kansas is legendary for geographical monotony, for a landscape allegedly so absent of trees and relief that the state has become the butt of national jokes and a cultural synonym for flat. U.S. Forest Service researchers noted in 1999 that forests covered slightly less than 3 percent of the state. So prevalent is the idea of a treeless Kansas that…

Promotional materials, which portrayed the Kansas climate, resources, and landscape in optimistic tones, were a common medium used to smooth the rough edges of the physical environment to Euro-American settlers in the second half of the nineteenth century. This article examines promotional literature of that era and evaluates the strategies…

Wichita's [Kansas] war on the Chinese began in 1886. Although a small war in comparison to other anti-Chinese outbursts in the American West, the persecution and violence against the city's small Asian population was nonetheless terrifying and significant to those who were the focus of the racist demonstrations. In an attempt to follow the…

As a major social force throughout the nineteenth century, religion proved an important factor in the settlement of the American West. Yet the idea of a religious figure as a western hero has never emerged in the popular culture adaptations of the Western, since the clergy are usually portrayed as gentle, "soft," or even somewhat…

While the Old Order Amish are often thought of as the plain dressing religious sect that attracts millions of tourists annually to Pennsylvania Dutch country, this Anabaptist group also has a significant history in the Great Plains. The Amish who settled in the Great Plains share commonalities with the Old Order Amish who remained in more…

The author examines interracial homicides in the early twentieth century in three Great Plains cities: Coffeyville, Kansas; Topeka, Kansas; and Omaha, Nebraska. Railroads attracted hundreds of young blacks searching for steady employment. Alcohol played an important role in violence levels as did the availability of cheap and handguns, and certain…

When she traveled to Kansas from New York in November 1875 to join a husband who had gone west six months earlier, Sarah Anthony faced bitter disappointment. What caused Anthony's discontent, at least in part, was an unfamiliar and alien landscape, as yet untouched by the hand of domesticity. With dedication and fortitude, however, the place could…

Describes the cooperative and egalitarian race relations in Nicodemus, Kansas--a town founded by former slaves in 1877--and the town's "boom" period in the 1880s. The white leaders who found common cause with their black counterparts were not abolitionists or social agitators, but common settlers who demonstrated that different choices…

Small historic sites are endeavors by small communities to preserve elements of their past. The sites they choose reveal the cultural values they esteem today. The structures most frequently represented at seven museum-developed sites are schools and churches because they were agents of social order, centers of community life and ritual, and…

Initially, Kansas prohibited school segregation except for elementary schools in cities over 15,000 people. As Topeka annexed areas in the early 20th century, African Americans accustomed to integration filed court challenges, which failed. Subsequent efforts to desegregate Topeka are traced, through the landmark 1954 case. Black teachers in…