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At the turn of the twentieth century, the Kansas City Star was a trust-busting newspaper acclaimed for its progressive spirit; fifty years later it was a busted trust, targeted in the most important antitrust action ever brought against an American daily. Haskell takes readers into the Star s city room and executive offices and tells the story of the three men with contrasting personalities and agendas who shaped the paper: William Rockhill Nelson, among the last of the greatpersonaleditors from journalism s golden age; the scholarly Henry J. Haskell, who led the Star to its peak of influence in the 1930s and40s; and Roy A. Roberts, who went on to combine the roles of newspaper publisher and political kingmaker. Haskell recounts such milestones as the Star s role in the City Beautiful movement that helped transform America s urban centers, the nation s entry into two global wars, a bold but ill-starred experiment in employee ownership, and the paper s battle with Boss Pendergast s legendary political machine. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

A wonderfully well-written history
Though BOSS-BUSTERS is a first-rate piece of scholarship, the most striking aspect of the book is the quality of the writing. The story of Kansas City and its Star is told by Harry Haskell in a supremely readable prose style that allows the fascinating characters who are the actors in this drama to live in the imagination of the reader. Kansas City in the 1880s was a town with dirt streets and an outlaw mentality; from this mean beginning arose the City Beautiful, a great and influential newspaper, and a host of individuals whose lives altered the course of the twentieth century. Though sympathetic, Harry Haskell's portrait of his grandfather, Henry J. Haskell (the Pulitzer-prize winning editor of the Star), is informed by a remarkable objectivity. BOSS-BUSTERS is a splendid piece of writing on political and social history, the history of journalism and, ultimately, on the human character.

Extraordinary Journey
Haskell's meticulously researched account of the history of The Kansas City Star is a brilliant journey through history. Not only does this work describe the political and social passions and conflicts of America from the late 19th century to the present, it sheds light upon the humanity and foibles of such players as Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and numerous civic and national figures. It shows how the powerful forces of a newspaper and its founder, William Rockhill Nelson, could alter the course of a young city's growth, as well as influence an entire nation. Haskell is to be commended for this very readable, scholarly addition to American social, political, and economic history.

Haskell's readable tribute
First and foremost this is afirst -rate read that is meticulously researched. A recall of the days when KANSAS CITYand ITS STAR were a vibrant center of the United States and print journalism not only reported the news but often made it. A time before corporate media andnewspaper chains were the name of the game in one newspaper towns, when bright energetic men with little money and brash bravado could set up shop and produce a paper and maybe make a lotta money.One such man was William Rockhill Nelson . This is his story and how he done it pushing the boosterism that both endorsed and transformed the booming cowtown on the bend of the Missouri River into the CITY BEAUTIFUL. He also became a big-time player on the national scene . Fun to readas he plays politicsloving the intrigue and being buddy-buddy with the likes of Teddy Roosevelt. And he made more than a pot of money. Well thosenot so halcyon days am gone. Print journalism is on the run.The Kansas City Star is part of the McClatchy Company which if you hafta be part of a chain is, I suppose, as good as it can get.Nelson's real legacy is the Nelson-Atkins Gallery of Art built on the grounds of his estate and housing a major collection of Chinese art.

Title Undersells Book
Comments written by:
Dr. E. Grey Dimond
Kansas City, Missouri
December 10, 2007

This is an excellent book for someone who has been deep enough into Kansas City to have a "feel" for its politics, its Establishment, the dynamics of this town at the river's bend.Here is where the Missouri River suddenly turns east, crosses the width of the State, to reach the Mississippi River at St. Louis.To fully be "filled in" on these basics of this community, the recent book about the Establishment of Kansas City should be, would be, the right beginning.Even then, one should have lived here, read its newspaper the Kansas City Star, and participated, even marginally, in the who's who--what makes it tick arena.I speak not of myself but of the author.Haskell is the grandson of one of the do-ers, leaders that shaped the newspaper and the community and for several years was on the Star's staff.

As a comment not needed but meant as a compliment: the title under-sells the book.Perhaps it will help sales but Haskell has produced so much more than this 'reach for eye-catching' label suggests. This is a book about the life of the Kansas City Star from its founding to that point that it sold its ownership away to distant buyers who never knew the town, who lost the boldness, activism, guts that made the paper and certainly helped make the city.I have lived here in both eras and each day's newspaper is a reminder of the loss.

The book is the story of William Rockhill Nelson, J.C. Nichols, Tom
Pendergast, Senator Reed (Nelly Don's husband), Roy Roberts, Henry J. Haskell and the Kansas City of the 1980s through the FDR era.For me, it is a reminder of efforts, good and bad, of the founders of local fortunes to secure it for their heirs: comparing Nelson to Nichols to Joyce Hall.

A must read
Kansas City was known as a "cow town" in Canada.By delving into the history of Kansas City and the impressive dominance and power of its newspaper, The Kansas City Star,Mr. Haskell's easily read book has shown me that this Mid-Western city was anything but a lowly "cow town."It was involved with highly important events at home, as well as abroad.Helen Keller, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Katharine Wright (sister of Orville and Wilbur Wright), Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, and Harry Truman are well-known names associated with Kansas City.However, William Rockhill Nelson, Roy Roberts and Henry Joseph Haskell were vastly influential socially and politically throughout many sectors of the United States.There is a wealth of fascinating information in Boss-Busters and Sin Hounds that will appeal to the general public. ... Read more

Product Description
In 1924, after the Hilldale Giants captured the league crown in the new Eastern Colored League and the Kansas City Monarchs won out in the four-year-old Negro National League, the two teams met in what was to be a best-of-nine series for the world championship. But a 13-inning tie in Game 4 and alternating wins throughout would force a tenth and deciding game, making it the longest World Series—black or white—on record in the modern era. It was arguably the most dramatic, as well, as each team reeled off three wins in a row, four games were decided by a single run, and five were won in the final inning. This heavily illustrated volume provides a comprehensive account of the first championship series played between teams from two all-black professional leagues. Noted Negro League historian Larry Lester provides commentary, records, and full statistics for each club’s regular season performance, along with biographical profiles of the players. Coverage also includes position-by-position comparisons of the Series combatants; a breakdown of the attendance, gate receipts, and team shares; game-by-game summaries; comments from the players; and complete statistics—including pitcher-batter matchups—for both teams. ... Read more

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The State of Black Kansas City-2002 is a collection of articles on wide range of topics pertaining to the experiences and challenges of Black people in Kansas City. This volume is intended to spark discourse, debate, dialogue and action around some of the issues, structures and policies that impact the quality of life for African Americans. The book is organized into four broad areas of concentration. Section one is entitled "Human Capital: Old Issues and New Ideas." Here the authors focus on the current state of Black families and children, our aging population and Blacks in the media. The second section, "E3: Education, Economics and Employment, " addresses the important structural elements facing our community. Entitled "Law and Liberty," section three takes a detailed look at Black in the judiciary and the issue of disproportionate minority confinement in the juvenile justice system. The final section, entitled "Leadership," sets forth a progressive vision for who will lead us into the new millennium, and how. ... Read more

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Sarah Bernhardt, Sir Henry Irving, Edwin Booth. There was a time when they all played Kansas City. From star-studded engagements at ornate opera houses to risqu?? shows in Fourth Street honky-tonks, Kansas City was a cow town that wanted to civilize itself through the performing arts. And because it was a railway hub in the heyday of trouping, it opened its doors to America s traveling performers. Drawing on the recollections of renowned theater critic David Austin Latchaw and on newspaper archives of the era, Felicia Londr?? has gleaned long-lost nuggets of theater life both the legitimate stage and popular fare to create a fascinating account of a city and its theater culture. ... Read more

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Since 1803, when York, a slave in the Lewis and Clark expedition, stood on the bluffs overlooking Kansas City, African Americans have contributed to the city’s rich history. Men and women like Tom Bass, Emily Fisher, Sam Sheperd, and Hiram Young built the region in slavery and in freedom. Musicians such as Julie Lee, Bennie Moten, Joe Turner, and Count Basie turned Kansas City into a jazz mecca in the 1920s and ’30s. The professional class made their voice heard with the establishment of the Kansas City Monarchs baseball team, the Kansas City Call newspaper, and election of the city’s first black mayor, Emmanuel Cleaver. With over 200 vintage images, Kansas City recreates this beautiful mosaic of African-American community. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A real treat!
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then Arcadia Publishing's Black America Series is worth millions. Each title in the series (currently 82 and growing) focuses on a region or theme, and is written by a local history buff with an obvious passion for their subject. Each is packed with 200 photographs depicting scenes from family, social, business, cultural, religious and political life, with narrative to place them in context. Many of the photos are from private collections and the archives of black newspapers.

The power of making visible what was formerly invisible cannot be overestimated. I have personally reviewed three titles and recommend them all: ANOTHER ANN ARBOR by Carol Gibson and Lola M. Jones, CINCINNATI by Gina Ruffin Moore, and KANSAS CITY by Delia C. Gillis. ... Read more

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Though Satchel Paige lived into the early 1980s, much of our information about his life and especially his career is the stuff of anecdote. He is nevertheless a central figure--arguably the central figure--in our reconstructions of Negro Leagues history. This collection of papers from the 9th Annual Jerry Malloy Negro League Conference focuses on the celebrity of Satchel Paige and the team he is most closely associated with, the Kansas City Monarchs. Accounts of Paige's exploits are scrutinized and the effects of his fame, on both the contemporary perception of black baseball and its depiction in the years since, are discussed. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (2)

Allen Chapel
Allen Chapel AME Church in Kansas City, Missouri is prominently mentioned numerous times throughout the book.As a member of Allen Chapel, The Mother Church in Kansas City, Missouri; I was please to know how many aristocrats were past members.Good book for historical purposes.

Ms. Jo Lee Brooks

Valuable Contribution
This is a valuable contribution to the field of African-American urban studies.Coulter tells the forgotten stories of a vibrant black community that develooped around downtown Kansas City in the early twentieth century.He tells the stories of men and women, professionals and laborers, young and old.This work will stand as a benchmark for the study of black communities in the mid-west. ... Read more

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The origins, development, and consequences of racial segregation in Kansas City. ... Read more

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From Abilene to Wichita and beyond, a constellation of cities glitters across the fertile plains of Kansas. Their history is entwined with that of the state as a whole, and their size and status are rarely questioned. Yet as James Shortridge reveals, the evolution of urban Kansas remains a largely untold story of competition, rivalry, and metropolitan dreams.

Cities on the Plains relates the history of Kansas's larger communities from the 1850s to the present. The first book to provide a comprehensive, comparative account of an entire state's urban development, it shows how Kansas's current hierarchy of cities and urban development emerged from a complex and ongoing series of promotional strategies. Railroads, the mining industry, the cattle trade--all exercised their influence over where and when these settlements were originally established.

Drawing on rich historical research filtered through cultural geography, Shortridge looks at the 118 communities that ever achieved a population of 2,500. He tells how mercantilism dominated urban thinking in territorial days until after statehood, when cities competed for the capital, prisons, universities, and other institutions. He also shows how geography and size were employed by entrepreneurs and government officials to prepare strategies for economic development. And he describes how the railroads especially promoted the founding of cities in the nineteenth century--and how this system has fared since 1950 in the face of globalization and the growth of interstate highways.

Throughout the book, Shortridge demonstrates how cities competed for dominance within their regions, and he solves mysteries of growth and stagnation by evaluating them according to their abilities to respond to change. Sharing anecdotes along with insights, he tells why Wichita is the unexpected metropolis, why the citizens of Leavenworth thought a prison was a better urban asset than a college, and how Garden City grew despite the plans of the Santa Fe Railroad.

Cities on the Plains provides an incisive new look not only at Kansas history but also at how American cities in general have evolved over the last century and a half. ... Read more

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As an avenue for progressive politics in a nation still skeptical of change, community organizing today faces significant challenges. This book assesses that activity within the context of political, cultural, social, and economic changes in cities--from World War II to the present--to show how community-based organizations have responded.

Transforming the City is the first book to examine the current state of community organizing in American cities, analyzing its place in contemporary progressive politics and assessing whether it has changed in response to changes in the political economy. Leading urban scholars--Peter Dreier, Robert Fisher, Clarence N. Stone, Dennis Shirley, and others--have been drawn from a wide range of disciplines to offer original commentaries on the strengths and limitations of community organizing, a form of political and civic engagement that is too often overlooked by those who bemoan the decline in social capital.

While embracing mobilization as a way to cope with the problems afflicting inner cities, these essays acknowledge the challenges inherent in globalization, de-industrialization, the demise of ward-based politics, and the values that shape contemporary American culture. They argue that larger changes in the political economy have reshaped the local ecology of civic engagement, thereby impacting the focus, orientation, and effectiveness of community organizing.

The book features case studies from Chicago to New Orleans to El Paso, and covers community organizations from many of the organizing networks and models, such as ACORN, IAF, PICO, and DART. These cases address key policy areas such as education and housing, and the role of race in these issues and in organizing in general. By the actual practice of this form of democratic politics, they also show the potential of community organizing for addressing concerns about Americans' disengagement from civic and political life.

Whether pursuing longstanding problems about housing or more recent issues such as wages paid by big-box retailers, community organizing continues to have an important role to play as part of a broader progressive movement. As America decides what kind of society it wants to be, these insightful articles illuminate those larger trends in the local ecology that are forcing organizers to alter their strategies, operations, and visions for the future.

This book is part of the Studies in Government and Public Policy series. ... Read more

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In the last twenty years, urban centers worldwide have experienced enormous booms and busts as real-estate developers, financial institutions, and public officials first poured resources into physical redevelopment, then watched as the market collapsed before booming again in the 1990s. In this extensively revised edition of her highly regarded The City Builders, Susan Fainstein examines major redevelopment efforts in New York and London to uncover the forces behind these investment cycles and the role that public policy can play in moderating market instability.

Fainstein chronicles the progress of three development projects in New York (Times Square, downtown Brooklyn, and Battery Park City) and three in London (King's Cross, Spitalfields, and Docklands). Analyzing the political and economic processes underlying physical changes in these two cities during the last two decades, she uncovers the role played by developers' perceptions and strategies in their interactions with both public policy-makers and property markets. This new edition follows each development effort to the present and places the discussion in a newly strengthened theoretical framework.

In her investigation of the convergence between London and New York during the 1980s and then the divergence that began in the 1990s, Fainstein traces similarities and differences in the effects of globalization, ideology, and institutional structure in each city's experience. This comparative framework also sheds considerable light on the contributing roles of structure and agency in creating final outcomes.

Fainstein concludes by assessing the impact of "theme park" development on the urban fabric and recommending a set of realistic strategies to both redevelop cities and improve the lives of urban residents.

This book is part of the Studies in Government and Public Policy series. ... Read more

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A leading theorist in urban politics, Clarence Stone redefined the field with his prize-winning book Regime Politics and is now acknowledged as the father of "regime analysis." Over the course of four decades, he has examined political power and leadership, race and politics, and the politics of social reform in urban settings through writings that have critiqued, debated, and recast large questions about democracy and inequality.

This book collects ten classic articles and essays by Stone to create a succinct reader in urban politics. It encompasses theoretical work on urban political power; examinations of political leadership in community politics; considerations of race, class, and political power in Atlanta; and writings on the politics of social reform and urban regeneration. These pieces provide a model for integrating empiricism with theory, offer Stone's own reflections on his theory, and demonstrate the evolution of his thought.

The volume also features three new pieces. The editors' introduction provides an insightful assessment of the place of urban politics in political science and an overview of Stone's contributions to the field. Stone himself provides a brand new essay that paints a vision for a new urban agenda, using the regime concept as a base on which to build for the future. And Jennifer Hochschild's concluding chapter assesses Stone's work and lays out alternative perspectives, locating his scholarship within political science and pointing out its many strengths as well as some of its omissions.

This collection reminds those interested in discourse about democracy, representation, inequality, justice, and power of the advantages that studying cities can bring to these important issues. It also serves to redirect urbanists to important foundational aspects of the urban regime framework and will stand as the legacy of the most influential theorist in his field.

This book is part of the Studies in Government and Public Policy series. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Good source of information for the urban theorist
Clarence Stone provides an excellent analysis on urban theory and the editors do a great job of introducing regime theory to the reader. The only downside, perhaps, is the shear level of information that Stone is delivering in his writings, which would likely be more accessible to readers in a digital format that could be easily searched through. Sometimes information is presented that is redundant, but this is partly on purpose so as to flush out ideas to their fullest potential; however, it may grow tiresome for some readers.

This is by no means a simple book so if you've never read anything on urban politics or urban political theory before it may seem difficult to get through; however, you will come through with a solid understanding of the arguments surrounding pluralism, elitism, and Stone's regime theory. Stone's critiques of both pluralism and elitism do well to flush out both ideas, which saves the reader from having to buy other books to understand the points of pluralism or elitism well enough to get at the crux of Stone's regime theory analysis. Stone doesn't dodge any punches either and his brief address to Marxist critiques of regime theory are well placed, well thought out, and ultimately leave the reader feeling like Stone is doing everything he can to anticipate critiques of his ideas from every angle. This theme is pervasive throughout the book, and is the reason it is so exhaustive.

A highly recommended book. ... Read more

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Educational reform is one of the most critical issues facing our cities, but some cities are better at it than others. To explain why, this book relates education to politics, showing how the "whole village" can be mobilized to better educate tomorrow's citizens.

City Schools and City Politics is based on an eleven-city NSF study of civic capacity and urban education. As participants in that study, the authors conducted research in three rustbelt cities that have lost much of their tax base and have legacies of machine politics. They analyzed the ways in which government, business, and community leaders create, or fail to create, civic support for public education, focusing on why certain cities show greater initiative than others in addressing these problems.

The authors reveal that, of the cities examined, Pittsburgh has made the most strides in educational reform, followed by Boston, while St. Louis has consistently lagged behind. Their observations show that cross-sectorial coalitions are essential for bringing about change; that organizational arrangements in the business community and their relationship to local government affect whether there is the capacity to address school reform; that leadership is critical in bringing about change; and that municipal institutions and culture influence a city's ability to take action.

Packed with empirical data and analysis, City Schools and CityPolitics demonstrates the citywide and long-term character ofsuccessful efforts to reform public schools, relating education to thepriorities of municipal governments and describing the conditionsunder which reform becomes possible. It extends regime theory topublic education and shows that education policy is inextricablylinked with urban political life and is an issue of real concern topolitical science.

This book is part of the Studies in Government and PublicPolicy series. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A MUST READ for anyone interested in education reform
I am the founder of St. Louis, Missouri's first charter school - the St. Louis Charter School...This book is an invaluable resource on national education and urban trends.It is packed with a wealth of data on schools, student, and cities.Once you have read the book, you will be armed with real numbers, case studies and examples to use in planning and promoting your own charter school or engaging in conversations with others about education reform and the history of public education in America. ... Read more