The Nebraska-Kansas Act of 1854 turns upside down the traditional way of thinking about one of the most important laws ever passed in American history. The act that created Nebraska and Kansas also, in effect, abolished the Missouri Compromise, which had prohibited slavery in the region since 1820. This bow to local control outraged the nation and led to vicious confrontations, including Kansas' subsequent mini-civil war. At the 150th anniversary of the Kansas-Nebraska Act these scholars reexamine the political, social, and personal contexts of this act and its effect on the course of American history.
"Scattered across Nebraska are markers of the state's heritage. Many are in spots more remote than the Point of Beginning marker. When most of these were erected in the 1910s through the early 1930s, Nebraska had more people in rural areas; after the depression of the 1930s, there was a vast migration from farms to the cities. After a century, most Nebraskans and travelers are not aware of the touchstones to their history on the byways of the state. The purpose of this book is not to just identify and locate these early markers but also to recognize the people who placed them"--
The first phase of the Civil War was fought west of the Mississippi River at least six years before the attack on Fort Sumter. Starting with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, Jay Monaghan traces the development of the conflict between the pro-slavery elements from Missouri and the New England abolitionists who migrated to Kansas. "Bleeding Kansas" provided a preview of the greater national struggle to come. The author allows a new look at Quantrill's sacking of Lawrence, organized bushwhackery, and border battles that cost thousands of lives. Not the least valuable are chapters on the American Indians’ part in the conflict. The record becomes devastatingly clear: the fighting in the West was the cruelest and most useless of the whole affair, and if men of vision had been in Washington in the 1850s it might have been avoided.
When Juliette Kinzie first visited Chicago in 1831, it was anything but a city. An outpost in the shadow of Fort Dearborn, it had no streets, no sidewalks, no schools, no river-spanning bridges. And with two hundred disconnected residents, it lacked any sense of community. In the decades that followed, not only did Juliette witness the city’s transition from Indian country to industrial center, but she was instrumental in its development. Juliette is one of Chicago’s forgotten founders. Early Chicago is often presented as “a man’s city,” but women like Juliette worked to create an urban and urbane world, often within their own parlors. With The World of Juliette Kinzie, we finally get to experience the rise of Chicago from the view of one of its most important founding mothers. Ann Durkin Keating, one of the foremost experts on nineteenth-century Chicago, offers a moving portrait of a trailblazing and complicated woman. Keating takes us to the corner of Cass and Michigan (now Wabash and Hubbard), Juliette’s home base. Through Juliette’s eyes, our understanding of early Chicago expands from a city of boosters and speculators to include the world that women created in and between households. We see the development of Chicago society, first inspired by cities in the East and later coming into its own midwestern ways. We also see the city become a community, as it developed its intertwined religious, social, educational, and cultural institutions. Keating draws on a wealth of sources, including hundreds of Juliette’s personal letters, allowing Juliette to tell much of her story in her own words. Juliette’s death in 1870, just a year before the infamous fire, seemed almost prescient. She left her beloved Chicago right before the physical city as she knew it vanished in flames. But now her history lives on. The World of Juliette Kinzie offers a new perspective on Chicago’s past and is a fitting tribute to one of the first women historians in the United States.
History of Nebraska was originally created to mark the territorial centennial of Nebraska and then revised to coincide with the statehood centennial. This one-volume history quickly became the standard text for the college student and reference for the general reader, unmatched for generations as the only comprehensive history of the state. This fourth edition, revised and updated, preserves the spirit and intelligence of the original. Incorporating the results of years of scholarship and research, this edition gives fuller attention to such topics as the Native American experience in Nebraska and the accomplishments and circumstances of the state’s women and minorities. It also provides a historical analysis of the state’s dramatic changes in the past two decades.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, legislators in the Nebraska Territory grappled with the responsibility of forming a state government as well as with the larger issues of reconstructing the Union, protecting civil rights, and redefining federal-state relations. In the years that followed, Nebraskans coped with regional and national economic collapses. Nebraska women struggled for full recognition in the legal profession. Meyer v. Nebraska, a case involving a teacher in a one-room rural Nebraska schoolhouse, changed the course of American constitutional doctrine and remains one of the cornerstones of civil liberties law. And Roscoe Pound, a boy from Lincoln, went on to become one of the nation's great legal philosophers. Nebraska holds a prominent position in the field of Native American legal history, and the state's original inhabitants have been at the center of many significant developments in federal Indian policy. Nebraska Indian legal history is replete with stories of failure and success, heartache and triumph, hardship and hope. These stories are more than a mere record of the past, of treaties broken or trials won -- they are reminders of the ongoing and sometimes tense relations among the many peoples and nations that make up the heartland. Much of Nebraska law reflects mainstream American law, yet Nebraskans also have been open to experiment and innovation. The state revamped the legislative process by establishing the nation's only unicameral legislature and pioneered public employment collective bargaining and dispute resolution through its industrial relations commission and its relaxation of strict separation of powers. These seemingly contradictory trends, however, are but differing expressions of a single underlying principle inscribed in the state's motto: "Equality Before the Law."
