The Kansas Journey

The Kansas Journey Teacher's Resource Package accompanies the student edition and is organized for ease of use and to help teachers in their aim of delivering focused lessons. All of the material found in the Teacher's Resource Package is also included on an accompanying CD, with a customizable test bank. One Teacher's Resource Package is free with every purchase of 25 or more student editions. Please call 1-800-748-5439 ext. 175 for more information.

Following the success of S is for Sunflower: A Kansas Alphabet, husbandand- wife author team Devin and Corey Scillian join illustrator Doug Bowles in another rousing state tribute. One Kansas Farmer: A Kansas Number Book "counts out" an entertaining and educational travelogue of the state's history, geography, famous people, and places. Topics include the dancing prairie chickens and the invention of the microchip. Corey and Devin Scillian are graduates of the University of Kansas. They now live in Michigan where Devin anchors the news for WDIV-TV in Detroit. Devin's other children's books include the bestselling A is for America: An American Alphabet and Brewster the Rooster. Doug Bowles enjoys working with a wide range of clients in advertising, corporate, and editorial jobs, as well as in the children's book market. He also enjoys working on fine art collections and shows frequently in galleries around Kansas. Doug lives in Leawood, Kansas.

Magic has stepped out of the movies, morphed from the pages of fairy tales, and is more present in America today than you might expect. Soccer moms get voodoo head washings in their backyards, young American soldiers send chants toward pagan gods of war, and a seemingly normal family determines that they are in fact elves. National bestselling author and award-winning religion reporter Christine Wicker leaves no talisman unturned in her hunt to find what's authentic and what's not in America's burgeoning magical reality. From the voodoo temples of New Orleans to the witches' covens of Salem to a graveyard in north Florida, Wicker probes the secrets of an underground society and teaches lessons she never dreamed could be taught. What she learns repels her, challenges her, and changes her in ways she never could have imagined. And if you let it, it might change you, too.

It Happened in Kansas features over 25 chapters in Kansas history. Lively and entertaining, this book brings the varied and fascinating history of the Sunflower State to life.

'Swift-moving tales, always readable, often captivating. Dary is ever the master of narrative. This is a contribution to the literary heritage of the state.' -Thomas Isern, coauthor of Plainsfolk

Long before the first shot of the Civil War was fired at Fort Sumter, violence had already erupted along the Missouri-Kansas border—a recurring cycle of robbery, arson, torture, murder, and revenge. This multifaceted study brings together fifteen scholars to expand our understanding of this vitally important region, the violence that besieged it, and its overall impact on the Civil War. Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri blends political, military, social, and intellectual history to explain why the region’s divisiveness was so bitter and persisted for so long. Providing a more nuanced understanding of the conflict, it defines both what united and divided the men and women who lived there and how various political disagreements ultimately disintegrated into violence. By focusing on contested definitions of liberty, citizenship, and freedom, it also explores how civil societies break down and how they are reconstructed when the conflict ends. The contributors examine this key chapter in American history in all of its complexity. Essays on “Slavery and Politics in Territorial Kansas” examine how the border region was transformed by the conflict over the status of slavery in Kansas Territory and how the emerging conflict on the Kansas-Missouri border took on a larger national significance. Other essays focus on the transition to total warfare and examine the wartime experiences of the diverse people who populated the region in “Sectional Crisis and Civil War on the Western Border.” Final articles on “The Border Reconstructed and Remembered” explore the ways in which border residents rebuilt their society after the war and how they remembered it decades later. As this penetrating collection shows, only when Missourians and Kansans embraced a common vision for America—one based on shared agricultural practices, ideas about economic development, and racial equality—could citizens on both sides of the border reconcile.

"In this collection of brief, evocative vignettes, Penner traces the influence of pioneer roots on the present generation as he chronicles the transformation of the land from untouched prairie to productive farm. As a boy, young Mil rubbed shoulders with the very pioneers who tamed the prairies, and he now draws on those recollections and memories passed on by his father to make the past come alive."--BOOK JACKET.