Kansas Open Books

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.

All Kansas Open Books are available as freely downloadable ebooks in epub and pdf formats. Paperback editions are also available for purchase. Click on the cover images below to learn more about each book, download an ebook, or purchase a paperback. Open access ebook editions can also be downloaded from JSTOR and Project MUSE.

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
With a New Preface by the Author

A. J. Bacevich

The Vanishing Farmland Crisis

Critical Views of the Movement to Preserve Agricultural Land

John Baden

The Democratic State

Roger Benjamin, Stephen L. Elkin

Marcuse

From the New Left to the Next Left
With a New Preface by the Authors

John Bokina, Timothy J. Lukes

The Jet Makers

The Aerospace Industry from 1945 to 1972

Charles D. Bright

"The Constitution of the People"

Reflections on Citizens and Civil Society

Robert E. Calvert

Kansas Populism

Ideas and Men
With a New Foreword by Jeff Wells

O. Gene Clanton, Jeff Wells

The Frontier Challenge

Responses to the Trans-Mississippi West
With a New Foreword by April Petillo

John G. Clark, April Petillo

Life at Four Corners

Religion, Gender, and Education in a German-Lutheran Community, 1868-1945
With a New Preface by the Author

Carol K. Coburn

The Black Towns

Norman L. Crockett

Quipus and Witches' Knots

The Role of the Knot in Primitive and Ancient Culture, with a Translation and Analysis of "Oribasius de Laqueis"

Cyrus Lawrence Day

Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory

With a New Preface by the Author

Mary G. Dietz

Keeping the People's Liberties

Legislators, Citizens, and Judges as Guardians of Rights
With a New Preface by the Author

John J. Dinan

The Johnson Years, Volume Two

Vietnam, the Environment, and Science

Robert A. Divine

The Lost Promise of Progressivism

With a New Preface by the Author

Eldon J. Eisenach

Presidential Lightning Rods

The Politics of Blame Avoidance
With a New Preface by the Author

Richard J. Ellis

Enduring Liberalism

American Political Thought Since the 1960s
With a New Foreword by Jefferson Decker

Robert Booth Fowler

The Dance with Community

The Contemporary Debate in American Political Thought
With a New Foreword by Susan McWilliams Barndt

Robert Booth Fowler

Becoming Free

Autonomy and Diversity in the Liberal Polity
With a New Preface by the Author

Emily R. Gill

Lady Bird Johnson and the Environment

With a New Preface by the Author

Lewis L. Gould

Ike's Letters to a Friend, 1941-1958

With a New Foreword by Miroslava Chávez-García

Robert W. Griffith

Getting By

Women Homeworkers and Rural Economic Development
With a New Preface by the Author

Christina E. Gringeri

The Truman White House

The Administration of the Presidency 1945-1953

Francis H. Heller

The Enduring Indians of Kansas

A Century and a Half of Acculturation
With a New Foreword by Sarah Deer

Joseph B. Herring

Kenekuk the Kickapoo Prophet

With a New Foreword by Kiara M. Vigil

Joseph B. Herring

Class and Community in Frontier Colorado

With a New Preface by the Author

Richard Hogan

The Cattle Guard

Its History and Lore
With a New Preface by the Author

James F. Hoy, Jimmy M. Skaggs

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

With a New Preface by Eric T. Jones, Rebecca J. McLain, Susan Charnley, and James Weigand

Eric T. Jones, Rebecca J. McLain, James Weigand, Susan Charnley

The Idea of Democracy in the Modern Era

With a New Foreword by Greg Weiner

Ralph Ketcham

Groundwater Exploitation in the High Plains

With a New Preface by David E. Kromm

David E. Kromm, Stephen E. White, Gilbert F. White

Leaders of Reform

Progressive Republicans in Kansas, 1900-1916
With a New Foreword by Charles Delgadillo

Robert Sherman La Forte, Charles Delgadillo

The Urban West at the End of the Frontier

With a New Foreword by Sandra I. Enríquez

Lawrence H. Larsen, Sandra I. Enríquez

A Preface to American Political Theory

With a New Foreword by Sanford Levinson

Donald S. Lutz, Sanford 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, Richard T. Ruetten

Requiem

Variations on Eighteenth-Century Themes

Forrest McDonald, Ellen Shapiro

Harry H. Woodring

A Political Biography of FDR's Controversial Secretary of War

Keith D. McFarland

Multiculturalism and American Democracy

Arthur M. Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, M. Richard Zinman

Democratic Temperament

The Legacy of William James
With a New Preface by the Author

Joshua I. Miller, Sheldon Wolin

Slave Women in the New World

Gender Stratification in the Caribbean
With a New Preface by the Author

Marietta Morrissey

The Learning of Liberty

The Educational Ideas of the American Founders
With a New Preface by the Authors

Lorraine Smith Pangle, Thomas L. Pangle

Passions and Interests

Political Party Concepts of American Democracy

Gerald M. Pomper

New Governance for Rural America

Creating Intergovernmental Partnerships

Beryl A. Radin, Robert Agranoff, Ann O’M. Bowman, C. Gregory Buntz

Critical Pluralism, Democratic Performance, and Community Power

With a New Preface by the Author

Paul Schumaker

The Sex Radicals

Free Love in High Victorian America

Hal D. Sears

Kansas Governors

With a New Foreword by Virgil W. Dean

Homer E. Socolofsky

Landlord William Scully

Homer E. Socolofsky

Shaping Modern Liberalism

Herbert Croly and Progressive Thought

Edward A. Stettner

The President as Statesman

Woodrow Wilson and the Constitution
With a New Foreword by Trygve Throntveit

Daniel D. Stid, Trygve Throntveit

Brandeis

Beyond Progressivism
With a New Preface by the Author

Philippa Strum

Brandeis on Democracy

With a New Preface by the Author

Philippa Strum

America's Bachelor Uncle

Thoreau and the American Polity
With a New Preface by the Author

Bob Pepperman Taylor

Our Limits Transgressed

Environmental Political Thought in America
With a New Preface by the Author

Bob Pepperman Taylor

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

With a New Foreword by Joshua Specht

Charles L. Wood, 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