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| Free State Political Cartoon, 1856 |
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| In the John Brown house...this famous deification of him |
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| Caption from a Freedman |
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| From Kansas Historical Museum |
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| Populists' Politics are alive and well in Kansas (William Jennings Bryan would be proud) |
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| The juxtaposition of the tractor and our big rig struck me... |
In fact, it's the middle of everything that mattered in the 1850s. Today we went from Osawatomie for the John Brown Museum, to the Kansas State Historical Museum in Topeka, to Constitution Hall in Lecompton. I have been teaching about "Bleeding Kansas" for 16 years, and today, I seemed to see it for the first time. To be at the actual site where John Brown and his sons lived--before their fateful trek to Virginia--and to see the Assembly Hall where the Pro-slavery coalition passed the [eventually] doomed Lecompton Constitution, was simply stunning for me. The realities of any survey history course leave so much of the richness of a particular moment in the dust (no pun intended for the climate of Kansas...), but we've always emphasized "Bleeding Kansas", for good reason. 1854 marked the Kansas-Nebraska Act [a compromise that didn't give Stephen A. Douglas his dream of becoming president, and only gave the slavery and freedom factions more clarity in their positions] and January 1861 [after John C. Calhoun, Jeff Davis and the pro-slavery movement gave birth to the CSA] is celebrated for the moment when Kansas entered the Union as a Free State. I am left wanting to know even more about a period which I've always felt that I know both deeply and broadly, but now I know there's always more...thankfully, our school spends a fair amount of time on this period, and now we'll have contacts through the Kansas Historical Society (http://www.kshs.org/) which should be helpful for our department as well as (hopefully!) some students for their Junior Theses. I'm eager to share what I've learned both in terms of content and contacts to make the Modern US course even stronger. Enjoy the pics!
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