Forthcoming Issue

Volume 31: Winter 2008/2009

James Beatty, "Interpreting the Shawnee Sun: Literacy and Cultural Persistence in Indian Territory, 1833-1841."

In the fall of 1833, Jotham Meeker, a twenty-eight-year-old Baptist missionary from Cincinnati, arrived in Indian Country with a printing press and a sincere desire to translate native languages into script. While working with removed Shawnee Indians in present-day Kansas, Meeker used a unique writing system to print texts in the Shawnee language-one was a monthly periodical titled Siwinowe Kesibwi, or Shawnee Sun. It was the first periodical to be printed in what is now Kansas, explains author James Beatty, and, if classified as a newspaper, the first in the United States to be written solely in an American Indian language. Although some historians have noted the existence of two pages of the November 1841 issue of the Shawnee Sun, they have been unable to decipher Meeker's esoteric orthography. Now, thanks to George Blanchard, a respected elder of the Absentee Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, the outdated version of written Shawnee has been translated. And contrary to some early assumptions, we learn that the paper is not a report of secular happenings on the Shawnee reservation, but instead a highly didactic publication, aimed at transforming American Indian culture and instilling Baptist theology within the predominately non-Christian Shawnee community.

Brent M. S. Campney, "W. B. Townsend and the Struggle against Racist Violence in Kansas."

Born into slavery in 1854, William Bolden Townsend found his way to Leavenworth, Kansas, with his mother about 1860. During his second Kansas decade, Townsend emerged as a formidable leader and a champion of equality and justice for his African American community. He was, according to the Colored Citizen, "among the truest men in the State of Kansas," and "if he is spared to be a few years older," the newspaper predicted, "he will be known as one of the leading colored men of the nation." Although Townsend's black contemporaries continued to express such conviction throughout his life and predicted that Townsend's works would long outlive him, as the historian Brent Campney indicates, this extraordinary Kansan has been largely forgotten. Campney's fine study begins to remedy that historical oversight, focusing on Townsend's struggle against racist violence around the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing primarily on newspaper accounts, this essay addresses Townsend's efforts to obtain justice for victims of racist violence, a campaign that drew upon his skills as journalist, politician, and attorney, and thrust him into the role of militant.

Fred W. Brinkerhoff, "The Kansas Tour of Lincoln the Candidate."

To commemorate the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's one and only trip to Kansas and the bicentennial of the Great Emancipator's birth, Kansas History has edited and reprinted the Kansas State Historical Society's presidential address delivered by Fred W. Brinkerhoff on October 17, 1944, and first published in the February 1945 issue of the Kansas Historical Quarterly. Lincoln, who was essentially in training for the 1860 presidential campaign, spoke in Elwood, Doniphan, Troy, Atchison, and Leavenworth. The address focuses on Lincoln's Kansas itinerary and message, which, according to Brinkeroff, "showed up later" in the more famous speech Lincoln gave at Cooper Union in New York City on February 27, 1860. "Lincoln in Kansas tested out that speech," said Brinkeroff. "He wanted to try out his ideas on Kansans. He wanted to see how the things he planned to say would sound. He wanted to see what the reaction of the Kansas audiences would be. . . . He was a candidate for the presidency. He was skilled in politics. He was a careful candidate. He was glad to have the opportunity the [Kansas] trip offered."

"Abraham Lincoln Speaks at Stockton's Hall: Leavenworth, December 3, 1859." Brinkerhoff's discussion of the Lincoln tour is followed by a synopsis of his first Leavenworth speech, which was originally published in Leavenworth's Kansas Daily State Register, most likely on December 4, 1859, and reprinted in the Illinois State Journal, December 12, 1859. Introduced by Mark W. Delahay of Leavenworth, Lincoln addressed "one of the largest political assemblies that ever met in Kansas," touching on many familiar but profoundly important issues of the day.

In Memoriam

Editor's Note

Reviews

The St. Louis African American Community and the Exodusters
by Bryan M. Jack
xi + 178 pages, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.
Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008, cloth $34.95.
Reviewed by Charlotte Hinger, western Kansas historian and novelist.

Rights in the Balance: Free Press, Fair Trial, & Nebraska Press Association v. Stuart
by Mark R Scherer
xxii + 242 pages, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.
Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2008, cloth $40.00.
Reviewed by Michael H. Hoeflich, John H. and John M. Kane Professor of Law, University of Kansas School of Law, Lawrence.

Little House, Long Shadow: Laura Ingalls Wilder's Impact on American Culture
by Anita Clair Fellman
xi + 343 pages, notes, bibliography, index.
Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008, cloth $34.95.
Reviewed by Marilyn Irvin Holt, independent researcher, Abilene, Kansas.

Navigating the Missouri: Steamboating on Nature's Highway, 1819-1935
by William E. Lass
416 pages, illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index.
Norman, Okla.: Arthur H. Clark Company, 2007, cloth $45.00.
Reviewed by Fred E. Woods, professor of church history and doctrine, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.

The Fall of a Black Army Officer: Racism and the Myth of Henry O. Flipper
by Charles M. Robinson, III
xviii + 197 pages, illustrations, map, notes, bibliography, index.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008, cloth $29.95.
Reviewed by Roger D. Cunningham, retired Army officer, Fairfax County, Virginia.

Book Notes

Annual Index