HAYSEEDS

The tattered image of modern-day Kansas and how it got that way is the subject of this pioneering and wonderfully entertaining book. Robert Smith Bader traces the rise and fall of the state's reputation from the turn of the century--when it was a national leader in the two most prominent sociopolitical movements of the era, Progressivism and prohibition--through the Jazz Age--when Kansas came to epitomize strait-laced, fundamentalist values (H.L. Mencken proclaimed it the quintessential "cow state," chock-full of hayseeds, moralizers, and Methodists)--to today's consensus view of Kansas as drab and boring. The book concludes with a marvelous survey of recent popular culture and with a call for a reexamination of the state's historic strengths.