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The popular Rookie Books expand their horizons - to all corners of the globe! With this series all about geography, emergent readers will take off on adventures to cities, nations, waterways, and habitats around the world…and right in their own backyards. ... Read more

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In the wake of the turbulent 1850s, Kansas was popularly portrayed as a Yankee stronghold, a "child of Plymouth Rock" where Puritan virtue triumphed over base Southern ways. Perpetuated by a century and a half of historical propaganda, this fictitious notion tenaciously shrouds the real Kansas.

In Peopling the Plains, James R. Shortridge helps set the record straight. Early Yankee settlers did indeed influence the location of major education and governmental facilities, he shows, but they were only one of many regional and ethnic forces that molded the state's complex cultural and economic heritage. Germans and other Europeans established ethnic enclaves in central Kansas and introduced agricultural practices that persist today. Southerners expanded the cattle industry in the southern tier. Midland farmers came in search of cheaper land. Freed slaves sought urban and rural opportunities. Italians and other southern Europeans worked the southeastern mines. And Mexicans helped build the railroads.

Chock-full of information and maps constructed from a wealth of census data, this richly annotated atlas illustrates the distribution of settlers from diverse cultural and ethnic origins from across America and around the world. Regional maps, depicting northeastern, southeastern, central, and western counties, are broken down into townships to provide an accurate and detailed picture of the origins of the early immigrants.

Beyond mapping the physical settlement patterns--from those of pre-Civil War Yankee and Rebel colonies in the east to the configuration of turn-of-the-century homesteads in the west--Shortridge explores how those patterns were influenced by railroad routes and promotion; land prices and speculation practices; homesteading laws; U.S. and international social, economic, and political conditions; terrain; weather; and pioneer perseverance. He also demonstrates that many legacies of the original settlers have endured and are apparent today in social, political, agricultural, and religious customs throughout the state. ... Read more

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From Abilene to Wichita and beyond, a constellation of cities glitters across the fertile plains of Kansas. Their history is entwined with that of the state as a whole, and their size and status are rarely questioned. Yet as James Shortridge reveals, the evolution of urban Kansas remains a largely untold story of competition, rivalry, and metropolitan dreams.

Cities on the Plains relates the history of Kansas's larger communities from the 1850s to the present. The first book to provide a comprehensive, comparative account of an entire state's urban development, it shows how Kansas's current hierarchy of cities and urban development emerged from a complex and ongoing series of promotional strategies. Railroads, the mining industry, the cattle trade--all exercised their influence over where and when these settlements were originally established.

Drawing on rich historical research filtered through cultural geography, Shortridge looks at the 118 communities that ever achieved a population of 2,500. He tells how mercantilism dominated urban thinking in territorial days until after statehood, when cities competed for the capital, prisons, universities, and other institutions. He also shows how geography and size were employed by entrepreneurs and government officials to prepare strategies for economic development. And he describes how the railroads especially promoted the founding of cities in the nineteenth century--and how this system has fared since 1950 in the face of globalization and the growth of interstate highways.

Throughout the book, Shortridge demonstrates how cities competed for dominance within their regions, and he solves mysteries of growth and stagnation by evaluating them according to their abilities to respond to change. Sharing anecdotes along with insights, he tells why Wichita is the unexpected metropolis, why the citizens of Leavenworth thought a prison was a better urban asset than a college, and how Garden City grew despite the plans of the Santa Fe Railroad.

Cities on the Plains provides an incisive new look not only at Kansas history but also at how American cities in general have evolved over the last century and a half. ... Read more

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This reproduction was printed from a digital file created at the Library of Congress as part of an extensive scanning effort started with a generous donation from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.The Library is pleased to offer much of its public domain holdings free of charge online and at a modest price in this printed format.Seeing these older volumes from our collections rediscovered by new generations of readers renews our own passion for books and scholarship. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Journal of Cultural Geography, published by Thomson Gale on September 22, 2005. The length of the article is 618 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Cities on the Plains: The Evolution of Urban Kansas.(Book Review)
Author: Peter J. McCormick
Publication: Journal of Cultural Geography (Magazine/Journal)
Date: September 22, 2005
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 23Issue: 1Page: 143(3)

Article Type: Book Review

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Chapters: Rock City, Kansas, Waconda Spring, Meades Ranch, Kansas, Pawnee Rock, Haviland Crater, Point of Rocks, Lists of Places in Kansas. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 26. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Rock City is a park located on hillsides overlooking the Solomon River in Ottawa County, Kansas. It is 3.6 miles south of Minneapolis, Kansas and just over 0.5 mile west of Kansas highway K-106 and the Minneapolis City County Airport on Ivy Road at . In a patch of prairie about 500 meters (1600 feet) long and 40 meters (130 feet) wide, Rock City contains three clusters of large spherical boulders. These three clusters contain a total of 200 spherical boulders. It has been designated as a National Natural Landmark. The park, owned by a non-profit corporation, has a visitor center and picnic tables. A small admission fee, which is used to maintain this park, is charged. The remarkable size and spherical shape of these rock formation was first noted by Bell. Later, these boulders were either noted or described by Gould, Landes, Shaffer, Ward, and Swineford. Shaffer was the first person to map the distribution of these boulders at Rock City and investigate their petrography in detail. The large spherical boulders in Rock City are giant calcite-cemented concretions, typically called "cannonball concretions" because of their shape. They range in diameter from 3 to 6 meters (10 to 20 feet) with the average diameter being 3.6 meters (12 feet). These concretions lie 2 to 8 meters (6.6 to 26 feet) apart. Similar giant calcite-cemented concretions have also been found in a quartzite quarry within Lincoln County and in exposures of the similar age sandstones in Utah and Wyoming. These boulders consist of well-sorted, medium-grained sandstone, which is tightly cemented by calcite. The sa...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=2698185 ... Read more

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Chapters: Neighborhoods in Kansas City, Missouri, Cbd-Downtown, Kansas City, Kansas City Power ... Read more

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Visual highlights of Kansas ... Read more