The best-selling author of Alice's Tulips and other popular novels, Sandra Dallas exhibits a well-honed talent for evoking the past. In The Persian Pickle Club, Dallas transports listeners to 1930s Kansas, where a club of quilters welcomes a new member-and then must turn to each other for support when a startling secret comes to light. "A colorful exploration of Depression-era Kansas and the meaning of friendship."-New York Times Book Review

"The Walnut Valley Festival was launched in 1972 when a guitar maker, a farmer and a businessman built their own music festival from the ground up. It has made the small town of Winfield into an annual destination for acoustic musicians and music lovers from around the world, and it has always been participatory, with the informal campsite pickin' as much a part of the event as the stage shows and instrumental contests. The Walnut Valley Festival...

Since the last wild bison found refuge on the back of a nickel, the public image of natural Kansas has progressed from Great American Desert to dust bowl to flyover country that has been landscaped, fenced, and farmed. But look a little harder, George Frazier suggests, and you can find the last places where tenacious stretches of prairie, forest, and wetland cheat death and incubate the DNA of lost, wild America. Documenting three years spent roaming...

Biographical sketches of people "important to an understanding of Kansas history and society."

One beautiful summer afternoon, from her bedroom window on the second floor, Jody Linder is unnerved to see her three uncles parking their pickups in front of her parents' house. "What is this fearsome thing I see?" the young high school English teacher whispers, mimicking Shakespeare. Polished boots, pressed jeans, fresh white shirts, Stetsons- her uncles' suspiciously clean visiting clothes are a disturbing sign. The three bring shocking news: Billy...

"Bank robbers wreaked havoc in the Sunflower State. After robbing the Chautauqua State Bank in 1911, outlaw Elmer McCurdy was killed by lawmen but wasn't buried for sixty-six years. His afterlife can be described only as bizarre. Belle Starr's nephew Henry Starr claimed to have robbed twenty-one banks. The Dalton gang failed in their attempt to rob two banks simultaneously, but others accomplished this in Waterville in 1911. Nearly four thousand known...

Your round-trip ticket to the wildest, wackiest, most outrageous people, places, and things
the Sunflower State has to offer! Whether you're a born-and-raised Kansan, a recent transplant, or just passing through, Kansas Curiosities will have you laughing out loud as Pam Grout takes you on a rollicking tour of the strangest sides of the Sunflower State.
Visit the Museum of the World's Largest Collection of the World's Smallest Versions of the...