Wichita 1860 1930

Wichita, Kansas, has grown significantly since the mid-19th century, when a group of pioneering entrepreneurs arrived to build on the trading and hunting activities of the Osage and Wichita peoples. Those early days of commerce gave way to Coleman, Cessna, and other companies whose influence helped shape the city's development. From the Texas cowboys who ran the cattle drives to Lebanese merchants, the population of the city has been as diverse and as dynamic as its companies. This visual history of early Wichita showcases the colorful landmarks, people, and businesses that built the bustling city on the Arkansas River.

Wichita, a city of entrepreneurs, offered an ideal home for Middle Eastern Christians who started arriving in the 1890s. Initially identifying themselves as Syrians, they operated as peddlers across southern Kansas and northern Oklahoma. Peddling rapidly gave way to wholesale, grocery, and dry goods companies. Patriarchs such as N. F. Farha and E. G. Stevens established themselves in local business and civic circles. Primarily Eastern Orthodox, the Lebanese established two churches, St. George Orthodox Church and St. Mary Orthodox Christian Church, that became focal points of community life. After World War II, entrepreneurs responded to new opportunities, from real estate to supermarkets to the professions. In recent decades, an additional wave of immigrants from war-torn Lebanon has continued the entrepreneurial tradition.

Arizona is home to some of the region's most stunning national parks and monuments and has had a long tradition of strong federal agenciesÑalong with effective local governmentsÑdeveloping and managing parklands. Before World War II, protecting sites from development seemed counterproductive to a state government dominated by extractive industries. By the late 1950s this state that prided itself on being a tourist destination found its lack of state parks to be an embarrassment. Gateways to the Southwest is a history of the creation of state parks in Arizona, examining the ways in which different types of parks were created in the face of changing social values. Jay Price tells how Arizona's parks emerged from the recreation and tourism boom of the 1950s and 1960s, were shaped by the environmental movement of the 1970s and 1980s, and have been affected by the financial challenges that arose in the 1990s. He also explains how changing political realities led to different methods of creating parks like Catalina, Homol'ovi Ruins, and Kartchner Caverns. In addition, places that did not become state parks have as much to tell us as those that did. By the time the need for state parks was recognized in Arizona, most choice sites had already been developed, and Price reveals how acquiring land often proved difficult and expensive. State parks were of necessity developed in cooperation with the federal government, other state agencies, community leaders, and private organizations. As a result, parks born from land exchanges, partnerships, conservation easements, and other cooperative ventures are more complicated entities than the "state park" designation might suggest. Price's study shows that the key issue for parks has not been who owns a place but who manages it, and today Arizona's state parks are a network of lake-based recreation, historic sites, and environmental education areas reflecting issues just as complex as those of the region's better-known national parks. Gateways to the Southwest is a case study of resource stewardship in the Intermountain West that offers new insights into environmental history as it illustrates the challenges and opportunities facing public lands all over America.

In 1915, workers struck oil at a well in Butler County, Kansas, called Stapleton #1. Over the next several years, civilian and military demand for oil transformed what had once been the farm towns of Augusta, Towanda, and El Dorado (pronounced El Dor-AY-do in local parlance) into petroleum communities. Risk-taking entrepreneurs supported drilling and exploration that brought wealth to some and loss to others. Teams of geologists, using what were still novel and experimental techniques, fanned out across the prairie to find the right places to drill. Workers found employment that was hard and dangerous but offered excitement and opportunity. Families of those workers set up new lives in company towns such as Oil Hill and Midian. Drilling, refining, and related industries supported a wide range of activities. Oil money financed the budding aviation industry in neighboring Wichita, which literally launched the resources from under the ground into the sky. While the petroleum industry changed in the years that followed, the Butler County oil boom has lived on in the companies, the people, and the very landscape of the region.

The incredible story of the most decorated chaplain in US military history and his path to sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church. Father Emil Kapaun, a humble priest, went far beyond the call of duty during World War II and the Korean War. Often found with the combat medics on the front lines, unarmed, ministering to the wounded, and known for his intense devotion to the soldiers whom he called “my boys,” Kapaun became the most decorated chaplain in US military history, awarded a Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross and the Legion of Merit. But Father Kapaun’s leadership, bravery and selflessness don't end there. When the story of human history is over, evil, death, darkness—they don’t get the final word. It was Father Kapaun’s love for God that gave him the courage to lay down his life for his friends and for his country. Writer John Stansifer has spent years interviewing veterans and ex-POWs. Coupled with other interviews or self-published war experiences, as well as material from the National Archives and rare access to thousands of unseen documents, No Bullet Got Me Yet unveils the compelling history of the life of Father Kapaun as related by his friends, family and fellow soldiers, as well as in his own words from the numerous letters he wrote from the 1930s all the way to the battlefields of the Korean War.

Volume 8 of 8. Sources & Index to a genealogical compilation of the descendants of John Jacob Rector and his wife, Anna Elizabeth Fischbach. Married in 1711 in Trupbach, Germany, the couple immigrated to the Germanna Colony in Virginia in 1714. Eight volumes document the lives of over 45,000 individuals.