Frank Carlson Library

Dangerous Woman? Ordained by God? Gender matters! What do pastors really do beyond the pulpit? What's it like to be a woman pastor? It's complicated. People leave congregations when the pastor wears a skirt. Other congregations become advocates for women clergy. Rev. Dorothy Nickel Friesen, an ordained Mennonite pastor, digs deep into the soul of a pastor with humor, pathos, and passion. Her memoir, a collection of short stories based on true events,...

Dodge City, Kansas, is a place of legend. The town that started as a small military site exploded with the coming of the railroad, cattle drives, eager miners, settlers, and various entrepreneurs passing through to populate the expanding West. Before long, Dodge City's streets were lined with saloons and brothels and its populace was thick with gunmen, horse thieves, and desperadoes of every sort. By the 1870s, Dodge City was known as the most violent...

"In 1854, after recently arriving from England, twenty-two-year-old Reuben Smith traveled west, eventually making his way to Kansas Territory. There he found himself in the midst of a bloody prelude to the Civil War, as Free Staters and defenders of slavery battled to stake their claim. The young Englishman wrote down what he witnessed in a diary where he had already begun documenting his days in a clear and candid fashion. As beautifully written...

"The upper Arkansas River courses through the heart of America from its headwaters near the Continental Divide above Leadville, Colorado, to Arkansas City, just above the Kansas-Oklahoma border. Max McCoy embarked on a trip of 742 miles in search of the river's unique story. Part adventure and part reflection, steeped in the natural and cultural history of the Arkansas Valley, Elevations is McCoy's account of that journey. Going by kayak when he...

It wasn't until Libby Phelps was an adult, a twenty-five year old, that she escaped the Westboro Baptist Church. She is the granddaughter of its founder, Fred Phelps, and when she left, the church and its values were all she'd known. She didn't tell her family she was leaving. It happened in just a few minutes; she ran into her house, grabbed a bag, and fled.

"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,...

A self-taught artist, Blackbear Boskin (1921-1980) immortalized the spirit of a bygone era in his art. He rose to national prominence after his award-winning painting Prairie Fire was published in National Geographic magazine in 1955. His works were exhibited at museums across the country, including the National Gallery and Smithsonian Institution, and in 1965 he was the only American Indian invited to the White House Festival of Arts. His sculpture...

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...

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.

'The history of prisoner of war camps in the United States is a subject that has been largely ignored by historians. Pride and Honor: The Diary of Franz Kuester, is an interesting and valuable recording of history. It gives us the views and thoughts of a Wehrmacht officer that were held in prisoner of war camps in Kansas, Indiana and Kentucky. Kuester comments on the work, leisure time (to include what movies he saw), education, food, weather and...