Kansas History - Winter 2023-2024
Winter 2023-2024
(Volume 46, Number 4)
“Mashers, Dudes, and Street Loafers: The Harassment of Kansas Women in Late-Nineteenth Century Public Spaces”
by Isaias J. McCaffery
This article examines the problem of sexual harassment in public venues, a commonplace phenomenon which extended from Kansas’s territorial period into the twentieth century (and beyond). Evolving categories of harassers found expanding opportunities for abusive behavior in communities large and small, as increasingly mobile women worked, shopped, and socialized outside the home. The patriarchal expectation that male protectors--including relatives, spouses, and police--could create an effective shield from the street predators proved untenable. The news media sensationalized sexual harassment in a manner that ironically may have produced even more offenders. Newspaper editors praised women who defended themselves but hesitated in naming them, given the stigma that came from violating Victorian standards of feminine behavior. Over time, desensitized Kansans lost interest, and the goal of maintaining safe public spaces free from the effects of toxic masculinity remained unrealized.
“The Kansas Year of Celebrating Coronado, Tourism, and Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy”
by Marilyn Irvin Holt
In 1541 the expedition of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado entered present-day Kansas searching for gold. Four hundred years later, the Coronado Cuarto Centennial brought Kansans together to enthusiastically celebrate the man and his explorations. For decades there had been an ebb and flow of public interest in Coronado, encouraged by the discovery of Spanish chain mail, local pageants devoted to Coronado, scholarly and popular books about the conquistador, and debates over how far into the state the expedition journeyed. This preexisting interest in Coronado laid the groundwork for the cuarto centennial, but those involved in its planning wanted to do more than remind the public of Coronado’s one-time presence in Kansas. They intended the centennial to be a grand celebration that highlighted local and state history, drew tourists to the state, accentuated President Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy for Latin America, and provided events where, said one newspaper “everybody had fun.” This article examines how the celebration unfolded as a statewide event and also intersected with a national rise in tourism and a U.S. policy aimed at improving relations with Central and South American countries.
"Theodore Roosevelt’s Osawatomie Speech"
by Robert S. La Forte, with a foreword by Virgil W. Dean
The second installment in a new series revisiting articles published in the Kansas Historical Quarterly is Robert La Forte’s "Theodore Roosevelt’s Osawatomie Speech," presented here with a foreword by long-time journal editor Virgil W. Dean. The article, first published in 1966, explores the former president's consequential "New Nationalism" speech, delivered at Osawatomie, Kansas, on August 31, 1910. La Forte, who called it "perhaps the most important speech ever given in Kansas,” skillfully set the national and Kansas stages for Roosevelt's Osawatomie oration and critiqued its national impact. Although many state and national critics considered it a dangerous pronouncement for “big government” and overregulation in terms not unfamiliar to early-twenty-first-century Americans, early twentieth-century Kansas “insurgents,” or progressive Republicans, such as William Allen White, were jubilant, and Governor Walter R. Stubbs called the speech “one of the greatest pronouncements for human welfare ever made.”
Book Reviews
Book Notes
Index
