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Cities on the Plains: The Evolution of Urban Kansas

Amazon.com Price:  $52.81 (as of 19/04/2019 20:39 PST- Details)

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Description

From Abilene to Wichita and beyond, a constellation of cities glitters across the fertile plains of Kansas. Their history is entwined with that of the state as a whole, and their size and status are rarely questioned. Yet as James Shortridge reveals, the evolution of urban Kansas remains a in large part untold story of competition, rivalry, and metropolitan dreams.

Cities on the Plains relates the history of Kansas’s larger communities from the 1850s to the present. The first book to provide a comprehensive, comparative account of a complete state’s urban development, it shows how Kansas’s current hierarchy of cities and urban development emerged from a complex and ongoing series of promotional strategies. Railroads, the mining industry, the cattle trade-all exercised their influence over where and when these settlements were at the start established.

Drawing on wealthy historical research filtered through cultural geography, Shortridge looks at the 118 communities that ever achieved a population of 2,500, and unravels the many factors that influenced the growth of urban Kansas. He tells how mercantilism dominated urban thinking in territorial days until after statehood, when cities competed for the capital, prisons, universities, and other institutions. He also shows how geography and size were employed by entrepreneurs and government officials to prepare strategies for economic development. And he describes how the railroads especially promoted the founding of cities in the nineteenth century—and how this system has fared since 1950 in the face of globalization and the growth of interstate highways.

Throughout the book, Shortridge demonstrates how cities competed for dominance within their regions, and he solves mysteries of growth and stagnation by evaluating them in step with their abilities to reply to change. Sharing anecdotes at the side of insights, he tells why Wichita is “the unexpected metropolis,” why the citizens of Leavenworth thought a prison used to be a better urban asset than a college, and how Garden City grew in spite of the plans of the Santa Fe Railroad.

Cities on the Plains provides an incisive new look not only at Kansas history but also at how American cities in general have evolved during the last century and a half.

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