Cities on the Plains: The Evolution of Urban Kansas

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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 largely 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 an entire 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 originally established. Drawing on rich historical research filtered through cultural geography, Shortridge looks at the 118 communities that ever achieved a population of 2,500. He tells how mercantilism dominated urban thinking in territorial days until after statehood, when cities competed for the capital, prisons, universities, and other institutions. /