The Sunflower State is soaked with history, which in turn fills the walls of her buildings. Four major Civil War battles took place in Kansas: Lawrence, Baxter Springs, Mine Creek, and along the Missouri-Kansas border, giving Kansas the nickname "Bleeding Kansas." The infamous Bonnie and Clyde, along with their gang, committed multiple crimes throughout the state of Kansas, including at least thirteen murders and robberies. Amelia Earhart was born and spent her early years in Acheson, and Ernest Hemmingway lived and worked in Kansas City at one point. In 1973, a huge flood near Walnut Creek, east of Great Bend, revealed a mass grave. In June 1864, approximately thirty wagons with thirty unarmed men--several only teenagers--were attacked by 125 Sioux braves (unhappy by the way they were recently treated by the government). While passing deteriorating homes, the distant laughter of long-forgotten children and the cries of distant warriors echo on the breeze. Home is the most significant place in our lives--all of our experiences, every sorrow, and every success are imbedded into the walls of our homes long after they're gone. Trish Eklund's personal insights, and the stories of those associated with the featured locations, accompany the author's enchanting images.

"America Through Time is an imprint of Fonthill Media LLC"--Verso title page.

This book relates the history of a small farm, including the changes in the land, the flora and fauna, and the people residing there. Beginning with the days when the land was hunting grounds for the Kansa Indians and then the Delaware Reserve, this is the story of the forty acres of degraded prairie in northeast Kansas that the author and her husband purchased in 1976. Since then, the farm has been in the forefront of the organic, sustainable, and local foods movements, returning to its roots as a diverse family farm. The book documents the economic and agricultural changes that the land has endured and gives hope for a new agricultural future, with small farms once again contributing significantly to the local food supply. The many historic photos illustrate how the farm and its occupants have changed over the last 140 years.

“A few years ago, as I listened one night to my mother telling incidents of her life pioneering in the semi-arid region of Western Kansas, it occurred to me that the picture of that early time was worth drawing and preserving for the future, and that, if this were ever to be done, it must be done soon, before all of the old settlers were gone. This book is the result-an effort to picture that life truly and realistically. It is the story of an energetic and capable girl, the child of German immigrant parents, who at the age of seventeen married a young German farmer, and moved to a homestead on the wind-swept plains of Kansas, where she reared eleven of her twelve children, and remembering regretfully her own half-day in school, sent nine of them through college. It is a story of grim and tenacious devotion in the face of hardships and disappointments, devotion that never flagged until the long, hard task of near a lifetime was done.”—John Ise (from the preface) Deeply moved by his mother’s memories of a waning era and rapidly disappearing lifestyle, John Ise painstakingly recorded the adventures and adversities of his family and boyhood neighbors—the early homesteaders of Osborne County, Kansas. First published in 1936, his “nonfiction novel” Sod and Stubble has since become a widely read and much loved classic. In the original, Ise changed some identities and time sequences but accurately retained the uplifting and disheartening realities of prairie life. Ushering us through a dynamic period of pioneering history, from the 1870s to the turn of the century, Sod and Stubble abounds with the events and issues—fires and droughts, parties and picnics, insect infestations and bumper crops, prosperity and poverty, divisiveness and generosity, births and deaths—that shaped the lives and destinies of Henry and Rosa Ise, their family, and their community.-Print ed.

Home on the Range chronicles the epic drama of the settling and development of the High Plains, as viewed through the saga of journalist James Dickenson's family and the wheat-farming community of McDonald, Kansas. With a reporter's sharp eye for detail and human drama, as well as a lucid understanding of the grand sweep of history, Dickenson paints a highly personal portrait of American rural life and its tenacious struggle to survive. By turns lyrical, nostalgic, and unflinchingly realistic, Dickenson weaves a fascinating narrative in which shootouts, lynchings, human chicanery, and nature's treachery test the community's unswerving faith in hard work, tradition, and themselves.