Great Plains Studies, Center for

 

Date of this Version

Summer 1984

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 4, No. 3, Summer 1984, pp. 187-88.

Comments

Copyright 1984 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

City histories written in the late nineteenth century by amateurs were panegyrics to local men of property and standing. City "biography" was very much just that-a collective biography of the men who made the city what it was. As the discipline of urban history has matured, the view that tied each community's development to the unique personalities of its leaders has given way to an interest in the process of urbanization and the examination of cities as case studies, important primarily because of what they say about the larger urban experience.

Craig Miner's Wichita is a throwback to the old city biography, not only in its delight in the particular but also in its thesis that Wichita's elite was the key ingredient in the town's development. Miner contends, for instance, that Wichita's brief but profitable involvement in the cattle trade was due less to the town's fortuitous location than to the alertness and aggressiveness of its businessmen. Taking issue with Robert Dykstra and others who have emphasized the divisions among Wichita's business leaders, Miner finds a broad consensus in the urge to promote Wichita as a place to make money.

The argument has merit and comports with the view of a few historians who in recent years have taken an idiosyncratic approach to urban history by reasserting the importance of every city's own character and personality. Unfortunately, Miner's is a weak effort. Wichita's business community and political leaders, except for a few notables, are not identified or described in any detail, nor are they compared to those of other Kansas towns. Miner can not demonstrate that Wichita's businessmen were any more farsighted or aggressive than other entrepreneurs on this urban frontier. Miner asserts his thesis rather offhandedly, for to elaborate would interrupt the narrative. The book lacks conceptual sophistication.

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