In class today, we briefly discussed governor Kathleen Sebelius, and I decided to find out more about her. Kathleen Sebelius was originally named Kathleen Gillian and was raised catholic in Cincinnati, Ohio. She didn’t live in Kansas till 1974. She was a representative in the Kansas Legislature and eight years as insurance commissioner then was elected governor. Her father was a governor of Ohio, making her the first father and daughter governor pair ever. Her husband is K. Gary Sebelius and is a federal magistrate judge. The couple has two sons, one is a law student and the other a design student.

She was in the Kansas House of Representatives in 1986. Her winning state insurance commissioner was the first time a Democrat won in Kansas in over 100 years. Yay Democrats! She won against a Republican, Tim Shallenburger in the 2002 election. She is thought of as one of the most popular governors in the country.

In the governer’s personal column, she states, “This week I have the honor to promote Kansas’ growing economy and our role in the global aerospace market at the Farnborough Air Show in England.” She goes further on to praise Kansas for continuing to set records in exports, and for making over 50 percent of the airplanes that are flown in the world! She assure’s that we’ll remain leaders in this field by doing things like attending the Farnborough Air show.

As I browsed through her website, I found her to be a very busy woman! In fact, she last updated her website today the 24^th! In her biography I found her core concerns for Kansas very admirable. One can tell she has the greater good of Kansas in mind as she is concerned with our economy and creating jobs, children’s education, our families and communities, and improving our health care and renewable energy assets.  I always love seeing women holding positions of power.  It really shows how much progress we’ve made since womens suffrage.

Source: (Kathleene Sebelius’ website) http://www.governor.ks.gov/default.htm

I came across the letter shown above, and found it to be a good example of how some Kansan’s viewed the entire Brown vs. Board of Education case.  The letter is 8 pages long, and the first page is what is shown above.  Basically, this is a letter of appeal by J. J. Cummings to the state attorney general Harold Fatzer to not desegregate public schools.  Cummings argues that it is huge violation to his rights to be forced to live and learn with people of a different race. 

In the letter he says, “I deeply believe the colored man is happiest among his own people.”  Just this one line illustrates the belief that just because we have different skin color, we are not all equal as humans. 

Similarly, toward the end of the letter he states that, “The minorities enjoy the liberties and many freedoms, because of the generosity of the majorities, and cannot be placed up in special favor causing impositions upon the liberties in which we all desire.” This just shows how Cummings and many others truly believed that their lives were worsened by having to desegregate and “share” everything with other fellow Americans because of their skin color.

To everyday people this seems incredibly silly, but he was definitely not alone in his racist attitude.  I like to think that I would not be racist if I had lived during that time, but the truth is I just don’t know.  I look up to my parents more than anyone, and believe everything they tell me.  No matter how stupid it was, those people were taught from a young age that African Americans were inferior to them. 

Although racism is still very apparent in our society today, it is so much better than how it used to be, and is getting better every day.  Looking at letters like this one makes me ashamed to have ancestors so ignorant, but at the same time I feel lucky to be born at a time where equality among gender and all races is something that I’ve been taught to believe in my whole life.

Source: http://www.kansasmemory.org/item/211843 

After reading Sex in the Heartland, I wanted to find out more about the author, Beth Bailey.  I enjoyed her book and thought she did a great job at writing about history without making it boring.  After browsing around on the internet I found that she also wrote another book called, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in 20th century America. 

After reading short reviews about this book, I got a good idea of what the book covers.  Basically, Bailey gives a detailed account of the evolution of dating, or “courting”, through the 20^th century.  Bailey discusses the things that changed social behaviors and conventions, one of them being the car and the new windows it opened in dating.  This book obviously contains very different information than Sex in the Heartland, but the two are similar in that they both discuss the changes in sexuality in the 20^th century. 

After reading some of the different quotes from the book, I found this one to be a good clip to get the reader interested, “Dating moved courtship into the public world, relocating it from family parlors and community events to restaurants, theaters, and dance halls. At the same time, it removed couples from the implied supervision of the private sphere— from the watchful eyes of family and local community— to the anonymity of the public sphere.”

I looked further in the book by previewing it on this website: http://books.google.com/books?id=fqVre9_N2gkC.  And in the preview I noticed that Bailey’s writing is very clear, and the information is quite fascinating.  It’s funny to me to think about how dating was so different back then, especially when I get first hand accounts from my parents!  I could definitely see myself reading and enjoying this book, just as I did with Sex in the Heartland.

          While learning about the Dust Bowl in our selected reading, I began to wonder about my own grandparents and where they were during all of this, so I asked my parents.  My father’s dad came to the United States in 1928 from Sweden.  He was only 8 when he came over and spoke no English!  Although he has told me many stories of his childhood, they do not pertain to the rest of my blog because he grew up in New York.  My mother’s dad, however, grew up in a small town called Coffeyville, Kansas.  Coffeyville is in the southeast corner of Kansas, and from what I found, it did not get hit quite as hard by the Dust Bowl as the southwest corner.  My grandpa unfortunately could not tell me his stories himself because of his current state, but my mother and aunt told me what life was life for him in the 1930’s. 
          Kendall Jackson, my grandpa, lived in a city(name unknown) in Kansas in 1930.  When the Dust Bowl began, Ken was only 10 years old.  His family made the decision to move to a farm when the dust storms hit, so that they could grow their own food to survive.  When his family moved to the farm, they left running water and electricity.  Basically, they had to survive the hot summers, cold winters, and Dust Bowl affects with no outside help.  They had to slaughter their own food and then either salt and store it for winter or can them.  When I say “can them”, I mean exactly that.  My grandpa and his family would grow as many vegetables as they could and then pickle and can them to preserve them for winter.  Their refrigerator was a huge hole they dug in the ground and somehow kept isolated.
          One story that I found amusing was what my mom and aunt call the “snake story.”  Because they had no running water, they drank water from a well.  After drinking the water for a while, it began to taste horrible.  They went down in it and didn’t find anything at first, but soon found that there was a dead, rotting snake in the water.  Basically, their only source of water had been tainted by rotting snake carcass for days!  This is only one of the many stories of the hardships they had to endure while trying to survive on their own.   

          This story is so interesting to me because it really shows how incredibly different the life of a teenager was in the 1930’s from the life of a teenager in the 21^st century.  My grandpa and his peers weren’t concerned with “self esteem” and “expressing themselves”, he was merely concerned with getting food and shelter for him and his family.  After hearing this and many other entertaining stories of my grandpa’s childhood,  I have grown a newfound respect for him.

The bugs that everyone were calling grasshoppers were actually Rocky Mountain locusts that descended on the prairies from the Dakota’s to Texas.  In late July of 1874 millions of these locusts came without warning to Kansas crops and began their destruction.  There were so many locusts in swarms so huge that they blocked out the sun and sounded like a loud rainstorm.  The swarms were so big that when they landed, the locusts would almost completely demolish the entire crop. 

The locusts would even eat things like the wool from live sheep, clothing off peoples backs, paper, tree bark and even wooden tool handles!  The citizens referred to them as “hoppers” and reported them to be so deep on the ground that the locomotives couldn’t get traction because the locusts made the rail too slippery.  The areas that were hit the worst were the ones that were least prepared like Kansas.  To deal with the hoppers, settlers would rake them into piles and then burn them, but this didn’t solve the problem at all.  Some of the people built things they called hopper dozers or grasshopper harvesters to fight any further swarms of them. 

Source: http://www.kshs.org/portraits/grasshopper_plague.htm

QUESTION:

According to www.thefreedictionary.com, nationalism is defined as: “1. Devotion to the interests or culture of one’s nation, 2. The belief that nations will benefit from acting independently rather than collectively, emphasizing national rather than international goals, 3. Aspirations for national independence in a country under foreign domination.” Based on this definition, is the government’s policy on Indian removal an example of American nationalism? If so, why?

ANSWER:

The way we went about implementing Indian removal negatively impacted our nation because it desensitized Americans to the ideas of ethnocide and strengthened our ethnocentric way of thinking.  In the Indian Removal Act, Andrew Jackson regarded the Native Americans as lesser peoples than the American citizens, and demonstrated no respect or understanding for the Native American culture.  American culture was therefore tainted by this ubiquitous way of thinking, causing an intensified racist stigma that carried on for decades to come. 

The Indian Removal Act displays devotion to the negative aspects of the culture of America in those times, but despite all the horrible atrocities against humanity that we committed it was also an example of nationalism.