Frank Carlson Library

"Bank robbers wreaked havoc in the Sunflower State. After robbing the Chautauqua State Bank in 1911, outlaw Elmer McCurdy was killed by lawmen but wasn't buried for sixty-six years. His afterlife can be described only as bizarre. Belle Starr's nephew Henry Starr claimed to have robbed twenty-one banks. The Dalton gang failed in their attempt to rob two banks simultaneously, but others accomplished this in Waterville in 1911. Nearly four thousand known...

"Long before the first shot of the Civil War was fired at Fort Sumter, violence had already erupted along the Missouri-Kansas border--a recurring cycle of robbery, arson, torture, murder, and revenge. This multifaceted study brings together fifteen scholars to expand our understanding of this vitally important region, the violence that besieged it, and its overall impact on the Civil War. Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri blends political, military,...

Detailed account of the June 1966 tornado in Topeka, where property damage of $100 million made it the most destructive in U.S. history up to that time.

"Policing Sex in the Sunflower State recounts the little-known story of Chapter 205, a state law that gave the Kansas Board of Health broad powers to quarantine individuals with venereal diseases. Though the law was officially gender-neutral and the state initially detained a few men under the ordinance, Chapter 205 was almost exclusively enforced against women by the early 1920s. State officials quarantined women alongside regular female prisoners...

In 1869, Concordia, Kansas, was declared the county seat of what would become Cloud County. At first, the town existed only on paper as a project being pushed by James M. Hagaman and a small group of partners. Once development started, Concordia rapidly grew to become a center of commerce south of the Republican River that eventually attracted four railroad lines. It became a town of landmarks, including several famous hotels, two opera houses, Nazareth...

"Often called the "Mother of KU Women's Athletics," Marlene Mawson was appointed to the physical education faculty at the University of Kansas in 1968. A year later, the newly established national Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics for Women mandated that US colleges and universities provide women's intercollegiate athletics programs. Mawson was charged with establishing the program at KU. "Planning sports competition schedules, staffing coaches,...

Culled from Library of Congress and Kansas Historical Society collections, the nearly 200 striking black and white images trace a progression from "Bleeding Kansas", a period of violent struggle between free-state abolitionists and pro-slavery sympathizers, to the state's many contributions to westward expansion, railroads, agricultures, and America at war.

An account of the raid on the small Kansas town of Coffeyville in October 1892 by the outlaw Dalton gang, whose members were stopped by the courageous actions of the town's citizens who refused to stand idly by while the criminals looted and pushed people around.