Thanks to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University Press of Kansas, in collaboration with the University of Kansas Libraries, has digitized outstanding books in history and American political thought and made them freely available online.

Kansas Open Books forthcoming in Summer 2021

In Search of Canaan
Black Migration to Kansas, 1879–80
Robert G. Athearn

Diplomat in Khaki
Major General Frank Ross McCoy and American Foreign Policy, 1898–1949
Andrew J. Bacevich
With a New Preface by the Author

The Vanishing Farmland Crisis
Critical Views of the Movement to Preserve Agricultural Land
Edited by John Baden

The Democratic State
Edited by Roger Benjamin and Stephen L. Elkin

The United States and the Development of the Puerto Rican Status Question, 1936–1968
Surendra Bhana
With a New Foreword by Carlos Figueroa

Marcuse
From the New Left to the Next Left
Edited by John Bokina and Timothy J. Lukes
With a New Foreword by the Authors

Jet Makers
The Aerospace Industry from 1945 to 1972
Charles Bright

The Development of Rural America
George Brinkman

The Constitution of the People
Reflections on Citizens and Civil Society
Edited by Robert E. Calvert
Introduction by Wilson Carey McWilliams

Kansas Populism
Ideas and Men
O. Gene Clanton
With a New Foreword by Jeff Wells

The Frontier Challenge
Responses to the Trans-Mississippi West
Edited by John G. Clark

Timber and the Forest Service
David A. Clary

Life at Four Corners
Religion, Gender, and Education in a German-Lutheran Community, 1868–1945
Carol K. Coburn
With a New Preface by the Author

Montesquieu’s Comparative Politics and the Spirit of American Constitutionalism
Anne M. Cohler
With a New Foreword by Sarah Burns

The Presidency of William Howard Taft
Paolo E. Coletta

The Black Towns
Norman L. Crockett

Quipus and Witches’ Knots
The Role of the Knot in Primitive and Ancient Cultures
Cyrus Lawrence Day

Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory
Edited by Mary G. Dietz
With a New Preface by the Author

Keeping the People’s Liberties
Legislators, Citizens, and Judges as Guardians of Rights
John J. Dinan
With a New Preface by the Author

The Johnson Years, Volume Two
Vietnam, the Environment, and Science
Edited by Robert A. Divine

The Lost Promise of Progressivism
Eldon J. Eisenach
With a New Preface by the Author

Walt Whitman’s Western Jaunt
Walter Eitner

Presidential Lightning Rods
The Politics of Blame Avoidance
Richard J. Ellis
With a New Preface by the Author

Enduring Liberalism
American Political Thought Since the 1960s
Robert Booth Fowler
With a New Foreword by Jefferson Decker

The Dance with Community
The Contemporary Debate in American Political Thought
Robert Booth Fowler
With a New Foreword by Susan McWilliams Barndt

Becoming Free
Autonomy and Diversity in the Liberal Polity
Emily R. Gill
With a New Preface by the Author

Lady Bird Johnson and the Environment
Lewis L. Gould
With a New Preface by the Author

Ike’s Letters to a Friend, 1941–1958
Robert W. Griffith
With a New Foreword by Miroslava Chávez-García

Getting By
Women Homeworkers and Rural Economic Development
Christina E. Gringeri
With a New Preface by the Author

The Truman White House
The Administration of the Presidency, 1945–53
Edited by Francis H. Heller

Kenekuk, the Kickapoo Prophet
Joseph B. Herring
With a New Foreword by Kiara M. Vigil

The Enduring Indians of Kansas
A Century and a Half of Acculturation
Joseph B. Herring
With a New Foreword by Sarah Deer

Class and Community in Frontier Colorado
Richard Hogan
With a New Preface by the Author

The Cattle Guard
Its History and Lore
Jim Hoy
With a New Preface by the Author

Bull Threshers and Bindlestiffs
Harvesting and Threshing on the North American Plains
Thomas D. Isern

On Turner’s Trail
100 Years of Writing Western History
Wilbur R. Jacobs

Nontimber Forest Products in the United States
Edited by Eric T. Jones, Rebecca J. McLain, and James Weigand

The Idea of Democracy in the Modern Era
Ralph Ketcham
With a New Foreword by Greg Weiner

Groundwater Exploitation in the High Plains 
Edited by David E. Kromm and Stephen E. White
Foreword by Gilbert F. White
With a New Preface by David E. Kromm

Leaders of Reform
Progressive Republicans in Kansas, 1900–1916
Robert La Forte
With a New Foreword by Charles Delgadillo

The Urban West at the End of the Frontier
Lawrence H. Larsen
With a New Foreword by Sandra L. Enríquez

A Preface to American Political Theory
Donald S. Lutz
With a New Foreword by Sanford V. Levinson

Revolt Against Modernity
Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and the Search for a Post-Liberal Order
Ted V. McAllister

Quest and Response
Minority Rights and the Truman Administration
Donald R. McCoy and Richard T. Ruetten

Requiem
Variations on Eighteenth-Century Themes
Forrest McDonald and Ellen Shapiro McDonald

Harry H. Woodring
A Political Biography of FDR’s Controversial Secretary of War
Keith D. McFarland

Multiculturalism and American Democracy
Edited by Arthur M. Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman

Democratic Temperament
The Legacy of William James
Joshua I. Miller
With a New Preface by the Author

Slave Women in the New World
Gender Stratification in the Caribbean 
Marietta Morrissey
With a New Preface by the Author

The Learning of Liberty
The Educational Ideas of the American Founders
Lorraine Smith Pangle and Thomas L. Pangle
With a New Preface by the Authors

George Washington and American Constitutionalism
Glenn A. Phelps

Passions and Interests
Political Party Concepts of American Democracy
Gerald M. Pomper

Critical Pluralism, Democratic Performance, and Community Power
Paul Schumaker
With a New Preface by the Author

The Sex Radicals
Free Love in High Victorian America
Hal Sears

Kansas Governors
Homer Socolofsky
With a New Preface by Virgil W. Dean

Landlord William Scully
Homer Socolofsky

Shaping Modern Liberalism
Herbert Croly and Progressive Thought
Edward A. Stettner

The President as Statesman
Woodrow Wilson and the Constitution
Daniel D. Stid
With a New Foreword by Trygve Throntveit

Brandeis on Democracy
Philippa Strum
With a New Preface by the Author

Brandeis
Beyond Progressivism
Philippa Strum
With a New Preface by the Author

America’s Bachelor Uncle
Thoreau and the American Polity
Bob Pepperman Taylor
With a New Preface by the Author

Our Limits Transgressed
Environmental Political Thought in America
Bob Pepperman Taylor
With a New Preface by the Author

Randolph Bourne and the Politics of Cultural Radicalism
Leslie J. Vaughan

Political Theory of Conservative Economists
Conrad P. Waligorski

The American Deists
Voices of Reason and Dissent in the Early Republic
Kerry S. Walters

Lucius Polk Brown and Progressive Food and Drug Control
Tennessee and New York City, 1908–1920
Margaret Ripley Wolfe

The Kansas Beef Industry
Charles L. Wood
With a New Foreword by Joshua Specht

A Black Odyssey
John Lewis Waller and the Promise of American Life, 1878–1900
Randall Bennett Woods

The Roosevelt Foreign-Policy Establishment and the “Good Neighbor”
The United States and Argentina, 1941–1945
Randall Bennett Woods

Henry Adams
The Historian as Political Theorist
James P. Young