Kansas History - Winter 2024-2025
Winter 2024-2025
(Volume 47, Number 4)
“Imagining a Northern Kansas”
by Courtney Buchkoski
In the spring of 1854, Eli Thayer contemplated how New Englanders could stop slavery’s westward expansion. After he pondered the question “by day and dreamed of it by night,” Thayer found the solution—organized, cooperative emigration. His New England Emigrant Aid Company believed that free-labor settlements in the West could stop slavery’s expansion and ensure that the North never became politically subservient to the South. Emigration aid could also evangelize the nation, planting the institutions of the church and the state, and it would also make a profit. As Courtney Buchkoski argues in this article, the NEEAC did more than just settle towns like Lawrence and Manhattan. The NEEAC’s relentless promotion solidified western mythologies, including ideas of the vanishing Indian and the myth of the virgin land, which were vital to the long-term justification for the growth of the American empire. While men like Thayer increasingly saw their private entries into emigrant aid falter in the postbellum years, their combination of free labor, evangelicalism, and capitalistic speculation persisted through the Republican party’s vision of expansion.
“Innocent Victims or Vile Women? Kansas and the Age-of-Consent Reform Campaign, 1885–1920”
by Ann Vlock
In 1887, the Kansas legislature revised the age of consent to sex for girls from ten years old to eighteen. As part of the white women’s movement and the purity campaign, this age-of-consent reform benefited from the organizing power that the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), equal suffrage associations, and purity groups had honed in earlier decades. Agrarian, labor, and Progressive reformers and organizations were outspoken supporters as well. Newspapers document the arguments on both sides. Opponents usually cited the threat of blackmail by “vile” or “dissolute” young women, usually described as either financial or marriage coercion. Proponents of upward revisions cited the natural rights of individuals to their honor, health, and dignity and the responsibility of the government to protect the weak (women) from the strong (men). Kansas’s revision—one of the first—provided the national campaign with its earliest exemplary outcome. National reformers utilized the Kansas story as a yardstick against which to measure progress in other states, and as a means of cajoling and persuading other states to follow suit.
“Mexicans on the Kansas Plains: Stories of Struggle and Resilience through the Testimony of Gregorio Mujica in Garden City”
edited by Marco A. Macias and D. Nicole English
The Kansas Historical Society in Topeka is lucky to possess the research collections of Robert Oppenheimer, a former distinguished professor of Latin American history at the University of Kansas. Some of the oral history interviews he collected in the early 1980s were only recorded in Spanish. To make these accessible to researchers who do not speak Spanish, Kansas History will share three of these interviews. The first interview in the series was with Gregorio Mujica in 1981. Mujica was born in Michoacán, Mexico, in 1901. He came to the United States in 1913, during the Mexican Revolution. He ended up in Garden City and his interview provides valuable insights into the life of a Mexican immigrant who experienced many of the key historical events of the twentieth century, including the Mexican Revolution, Dust Bowl, Great Depression, World War II, and gradual social integration of Mexicans in the United States. This interview was translated and annotated with the assistance of students in Marco A. Macias’s Chicanos: A History of Mexican Americans class at Fort Hays State University in the fall of 2023.
Book Reviews
Book Notes
Index
Erratum
