"[A] guide to the history and development of law in the U.S. and the change from territory to statehood"--Back cover.

Explore the controversial legal history of the formation of the United States Prestatehood Legal Materials is your one-stop guide to the history and development of law in the U.S. and the change from territory to statehood. Unprecedented in its coverage of territorial government, this book identifies a wide range of available resources from each state to reveal the underlying legal principles that helped form the United States. In this unique publication, a state expert compiles each chapter using his or her own style, culminating in a diverse sourcebook that is interesting as well as informative. In Prestatehood Legal Materials, you will find bibliographies, references, and discussion on a varied list of source materials, including: state codes drafted by Congress county, state, and national archives journals and digests state and federal reports, citations, surveys, and studies books, manuscripts, papers, speeches, and theses town and city records and documents Web sites to help your search for more information and more Prestatehood Legal Materials provides you with brief overviews of state histories from colonization to acceptance into the United States. In this book, you will see how foreign countries controlled the laws of these territories and how these states eventually broke away to govern themselves. The text also covers the legal issues with Native Americans, inter-state and the Mexico and Canadian borders, and the development of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of state government. This guide focuses on materials that are readily available to historians, political scientists, legal scholars, and researchers. Resources that assist in locating not-so-easily accessible materials are also covered. Special sections focus on the legal resources of colonial New York City and Washington, DC—which is still technically in its prestatehood stage. Due to the enormity of this project, the editor of Prestatehood Legal Materials created a Web page where updates, corrections, additions and more will be posted.

After their first contacts with whites in the seventeenth century, the Kansa Indians began migrating from the eastern United States to what is now eastern Kansas, by way of the Missouri Valley. Settling in villages mostly along the Kansas River, they led a semi-sedentary life, raising corn and a few vegetables and hunting buffalo in the spring and fall. It was an idyllic existence-until bad, and then worse, things began to happen. William E. Unrau tells how the Kansa Indians were reduced from a proud people with a strong cultural heritage to a remnant forced against their will to take up the whites' ways. He gives a balanced but hard-hitting account of an important and tragic chapter in American history.

Here is a through assessment of the development of the University of Kansas during its first century. Clifford S. Griffin traces the University from little more than a high school or preparatory school to a college, and then to a major institution. No mere chronicle of the University's triumphs and progress, this book gives equal attention to the many disappointments and frustrations over the years. Griffin concerns himself not only with the physical growth of the institution, but with the nature of the University's goals and character as well. From John Fraser to W. Clarke Wescoe, each Chancellor of the University of Kansas faced unique problems in shaping the destiny of the ever-expanding institution. They struggled with the perils of an unstable economy, enrollment crises, departmentalization, disagreements with faculty and regents, disputes over open admission and the importance of scholarly research, demands for higher salaries and alteration of the curriculum, and even grasshopper plagues. Each administration competed for legislative appropriations, status, and public support. Anyone who has been associated with the University will find in this history many of the things he remembers best: its social organizations, athletic contests, student pranks, class feuds, and campus politics. Colorful Mount Oread personalities are described—leaders, scholars, politicians, and benefactors. Thirty-six photographs trace different phases of the University's growth. Even those individuals well informed concerning the history of the University will learn much about its past and its potential for the future. In addition, Griffin explores ideas about the purposes and practices of higher education, including the concept of the American state university as a servant of society. In many respects the development of the University paralleled the growth of the state itself; this book is therefore a valuable contribution to the cultural and intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Kansas.