Since 1803, when York, a slave in the Lewis and Clark expedition, stood on the bluffs overlooking Kansas City, African Americans have contributed to the city's rich history. Men and women like Tom Bass, Emily Fisher, Sam Sheperd, and Hiram…
A City Divided traces the development of white Kansas Citians' perceptions of race and examines the ways in which those perceptions shaped both the physical landscape of the city and the manner in which Kansas City was policed and…
Pushed out of the South as Reconstruction ended and as white landowners, employers, and "Redeemer" governments sought to reestablish the constraints of slavery, thousands of African Americans migrated west in search of better…
Chronicles America's troubling relationship with race through four interrelated stories: the transformation of a once-racist Birmingham school system; a Kansas City neighborhood's fight against housing discrimination; the curious racial…
Often defined as a mostly southern phenomenon, racist violence existed everywhere. Brent Campney explodes the notion of the Midwest as a so-called land of freedom with an in-depth study of assaults both active and threatened faced by…
Kansas Citians, like so many others across the nation, wonder, "Could it happen here?" The answer lies in this study of Kansas City's darkest moments-slavery, the border war, the Civil War, bombings of black homes, lynchings, the…
Slavery on the Periphery focuses on nineteen counties on the Kansas-Missouri border, tracing slavery's rise and fall from the earliest years of American settlement through the Civil War along this critical geographical, political, and…
This book documents how whiteness can take up space in US cities and policies through well-intentioned progressive policy agendas that support green urbanism. Through in-depth ethnographic research in Kansas City, I explore how urban food…
The Ku Klux Klan kicked off a nationwide revival in 1921 and took Kansas City, Kansas, by storm. The majority white population--alarmed by the influx of immigrants, Catholics and Jews--joined the Klan in thousands. The Klan held picnics…
Born and reared on the outskirts of Kansas City in Olathe, Kansas, Jesse Clyde Nichols (1880-1950) was a creative genius in land development. He grew up witnessing the cycles of development and decline characteristics of Kansas City and…
In this timely book, journalist Lisa Benson shares her journey from the newsroom to the courtroom in her fight for justice at a local television station. Lisa made national news when her twenty-year career as a news reporter / anchor ended…
In 1987 Judge Russell Clark mandated tax increases to help pay for improvements to the Kansas City, Missouri, School District in an effort to lure white students and quality teachers back to the inner-city district. Yet even after…
In the late 1950s, as the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. was at last gaining ground, 16 soldiers sat confined in basement cells on death row in the army's Fort Leavenworth maximum security prison in Kansas. Exactly eight were white and…
More than a century of racist policy, lending practices, restrictive covenants, and "gentleman's agreements" ensured that Kansas City developed as and remains a metropolis heavily segregated by race. Find out why east side vs. west side…
This landmark publication brings North American Indigenous art to the fore with the presentation of 280 objects from the culturally and aesthetically rich collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. More than two-thirds of the volume's…
Before their relocation to the Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma, the Kanza Indians spent twenty-seven years on a reservation near Council Grove, Kansas, on the Santa Fe Trail. In The Darkest Period , Ronald D. Parks tells the story…
This book is an account of the Frontier Guards who defended President Lincoln from a kidnapping and assassination plot in the opening days of the Civil War. It looks into the lives of these 116 men and their leader, the Kansas "free state"…
