Central Kansas Library System

Award-winning author Peter D. Kiernan focuses on America's greatest challenge--and opportunity--restoring the middle class to its full promise and potential. Our educated, skilled, and motivated middle class was the cornerstone of America's postwar economic might, but the country's dynamic core has struggled and changed dramatically through the last three decades. Kiernan's extensively researched story, told through individual histories, shows how...

"In this work of creative nonfiction, Kate Benz provides an intimate look at the present-day residents of Courtland, Kansas (population 285), a town whose economy depends almost entirely on agriculture. Her narrative shows how macro-level issues, from rising tariffs and operation costs to sinking commodity prices and infusions of federal farm subsidies affect these Americans' daily lives, and how their love of their community continues their collective...

Describes the development of the railroad in North America and its influence on the settling of the West during the nineteenth century.

Tom Blair has written, in the voice of Ben Franklin, an updated-for-today book that draws on the essence of Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack to view America in 2011.

This is a pleasantly written study of rural life in Sangamon County, Abraham Lincoln's neck of the woods. Concentrating on the first half of the 19th century, Faragher skillfully interweaves social, economic, and cultural history into a whole that is local history at its best, but, because of multiple implications, is much more than the history of a locality. Using many sources, he covers Indian-white relations, the establishment of towns, childbearing...