Railroad Empire across the Heartland
Railroad Empire across the Heartland

Author: James E. Sherow

Publisher: UNM Press

Published: 2014-10-15

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0826355102

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Best known for his Civil War photographs, Alexander Gardner also documented the construction of the Union Pacific Railway, Eastern Division (later the Kansas Pacific Railroad), across Kansas beginning in 1867. This book presents recent photographs by John R. Charlton of the scenes Gardner recorded, paired with the Gardner originals and accompanied by James E. Sherow’s discussion. Like most rephotography projects, this one provides fascinating information about the changes in the landscape over the last century and a half. The book presents ninety pairs of Gardner’s and Charlton’s photographs. In all of Charlton’s photos he duplicates the exact location and time of day of the Gardner originals. Sherow uses the paired images to show how Indian and Anglo-American land-use practices affected the landscape. As the Union Pacific claimed, the railroad created an American empire in the region, and Charlton’s rephotography captures the transformation of the grasslands, harnessed by the powerful social and economic forces of the railroad.

The Life and Legacy of Elizabeth Miller Watkins
The Life and Legacy of Elizabeth Miller Watkins

Author: Mary Dresser Burchill

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 2023-03-17

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0700634231

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Few women have had a more significant impact on the development and growth of Lawrence, Kansas, and the University of Kansas than Elizabeth Miller Watkins. Elizabeth Josephine Miller was born in Ohio in 1861 and moved with her family to Lawrence when she was a child. She attended the University of Kansas’s preparatory school in the 1870s but could not complete her education when a family financial crisis forced her to seek employment. She started working at the J. B. Watkins Land and Mortgage Company in 1887 as a secretary and in 1909 she married the company’s founder and owner, Jabez Watkins. Together the Watkinses dedicated themselves to philanthropy and were committed to giving all their wealth, as Elizabeth said, “for the good of humanity, chiefly here in Lawrence.” Jabez died in 1921, leaving Elizabeth to manage the family fortune alone. Elizabeth wished to give women the opportunity for higher education that she herself had never received. In 1925, the Kansas Board of Regents approved her request to have a women’s scholarship hall built at KU. Watkins Hall, named in memory of her late husband, was constructed close to Elizabeth’s home—now the chancellor’s residence—and was followed a decade later by the construction of Miller Hall in 1936. As two of the twelve scholarship halls at the University of Kansas today, Watkins and Miller Halls are home to a vibrant cohort of young female scholars and an active alumnae community who continue the philanthropic vision of Elizabeth Miller Watkins. In 1929, Elizabeth donated $200,000 for the new Lawrence Memorial Hospital to be built at 3rd and Maine, where it remains today. She also established the first on-campus healthcare provider, Watkins Memorial Hospital, at the University of Kansas (now Twente Hall) in 1931. In this engaging biography, Mary Dresser Burchill and Norma Decker Hoagland’s extensive research successfully paints a portrait of a remarkable woman whose generosity endures at KU and in Lawrence and brings to light the astonishing legacy of one of the city’s leading philanthropists.

Last Lynching On Mount Oread
Last Lynching On Mount Oread

Author: Napoleon Crews

Publisher: Fireside Novels

Published:

Total Pages: 41

ISBN-13:

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One Negro student overcame impossible odds and became the first black man to be admitted to the law school, but he failed to escape the noose of a lynch rope, cutting his college career short. This tale details the universitiy's attempt to cover up the lynching, and the efforts of the city's only Negro police officer to bring the lynchers to justice.

Mount Wonder
Mount Wonder

Author: Scott J. Bloch

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2022-10-17

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 1666705640

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Memories of college have intruded on Bernard Kennisbaum's mind with increasing regularity. It is his junior year, and Bernard declares himself free of his father's financial claws, free to follow his Muse. A beguiling beauty, Apryl, has caught his eye, and her scent leads him into a lecture hall that will change his life. His unwitting arrival in a Great Books class--The Humanities Integration Program--devolves into a wild west showdown with a trigger-happy prof, ambitious administrators, jealous colleagues, vengeful state officials, hoodlums, and hangover hippies. Lured in by poetry, Plato, and female pheromones, Bernard discovers an unlikely collegiate underworld dedicated to rescuing Western civilization from soulless purveyors of the bottom line. The trouble is, Bernard doesn't know which side he is on, and he soon learns he may not know everything about his family or himself. In Mount Wonder, two cultures collide and roll into one rip-roaring adventure of love and learning. Based on true events at a major university, this novel will make you question your world and the world of higher education.

Birds, Bones, and Beetles
Birds, Bones, and Beetles

Author: Chuck Warner

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 2019-04-15

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 0700627731

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Every day, in natural history museums all across the country, colonies of dermestid beetles diligently devour the decaying flesh off of animal skeletons that are destined for the museum’s specimen collection. That time-saving process was developed and perfected at the University of Kansas Natural History Museum by Charles D. Bunker, a lowly assistant taxidermist who would rise to become the curator of recent vertebrates and who made an indelible mark on his field. That innovative breakthrough serves as a testament to the tenacity of a quietly determined naturalist. Bunker was part of the small team of men who constructed and installed the famous Panorama of North American Mammals, the centerpiece exhibit of the KU Natural History Museum located in Dyche Hall. That iconic building on the KU campus was expressly built to house the collection of mounted animals that impressed the world a decade earlier at the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition and World’s Fair. Once the panorama was completed, Bunker turned his attention to field collecting. Bunker’s field notes provide an accurate, authentic account of several expeditions to collect such specimens as well as a rare view of the extreme hardships of fieldwork in those early days. Perhaps most notable is “Bunk’s” 1911 expedition to western Kansas, where he discovered the fossil remains of a forty-five-foot-long sea serpent—later identified as Tylosaurus proriger, an aquatic reptile from the mosasaur genus and the largest example of the species found in North America. In 2014, Tylosaurus was named the marine fossil of the state of Kansas. Birds, Bones, and Beetles tells the story of a man whose passion for learning led to remarkable discoveries, extraordinary exhibits, and the prestigious careers of many students he mentored in the natural sciences.

The English Professor
The English Professor

Author: Margaret R. O’Leary/Dennis S. O’Leary

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2016-02-04

Total Pages: 710

ISBN-13: 1491772735

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Across the span of more than forty years, Raphael Dorman O’Leary, a professor of English rhetoric and English literature, taught his students at the University of Kansas to think straight, to put sinew into their sentences, and to embrace the magnificent literary treasures of their mother tongue. The English Professor, by authors Margaret R. O’Leary and Dennis S. O’Leary, offers a narrative of the life, work, and times of a revered Midwestern university English teacher. This memoir narrates how the professor, born in 1866, was raised on a Kansas farm in the post-bellum era. Like his father before him, he was committed to a life of learning and teaching. His colleagues knew him for his unpretentious exterior, honesty, and integrity, and his flashing anger at cheapness, vulgarity, pretense, and, above all, charlatanism. When Professor O’Leary died after a short illness in 1936, his personal effects passed through two generations to his grandson, Dennis S. O’Leary, who, with his wife, Margaret, discovered his papers while restoring a family house. The trove of material served as the core resource for the compilation of The English Professor. It provides insights into the histories of Kansas and the University of Kansas and of Harvard University, as well as perspectives on higher education, including the teaching of English rhetoric, language, literature, journalism, and oratory in the United States.

In the Country of the Kaw
In the Country of the Kaw

Author: James H. Locklear

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 2024-04-18

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 0700636412

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Gathering its waters from the plains of Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska, the Kaw is truly America’s prairie river; the only one to arise entirely on the Great Plains and traverse all three major grasslands—shortgrass, mixed-grass, and tallgrass prairies. James Locklear’s In the Country of the Kaw is a joyous exploration of the realm of the Kaw River, which stretches from the High Plains of Colorado to the Kansas City metropolitan area. The book’s first section profiles geology, landforms, and the region’s woodlands and grasslands. The second explores the rich biological diversity associated with the land and its inhabitants’ remarkable adaptations to the environment and each other. The final section is a collection of stories of human interaction with the landscape, how nature has shaped culture and culture nature. Locklear finds “astonishments” at every turn. In the Country of the Kaw is also a call to seek the flourishing of the natural and human communities of the region. Locklear describes staggering, human-wrought environmental degradations, but also finds great hope in the resilience of Nature and the inspiring work of conservation, preservation, restoration, and renewal being accomplished by individuals and organizations throughout the region. Locklear’s relationship with the country of the Kaw stretches from his childhood in Kansas City in the 1960s to his current professional life as a botanist working in the Great Plains. A half century of rambling and rooting around in this region has given him a deep awe and affection for its uniqueness and goodness, which he conveys to the reader on every page.