What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

Abstract

focus on Central Plains politics-in particular, Kansas and its conservative educational focus on creationism-complemented by Thomas Frank's critique in What's The Matter With Kansas (2004).However, no discussion of creationism appears in either the Religion or Education chapters.Instead, creationism is relegated to a discussion of Plains politician William Jermings Bryan, who defended creationism at the trial of John Scopes in Termessee in the early twentieth century.Along with the rise of religious conservative Republicanism in the Great Plains, there is yet one more aspect of Plains culture that remains illusive: a discussion of Great Plains subregions.One of the challenges of engaging with the Great Plains is that one can easily believe it to be a homogeneous, flat surface that runs undifferentiated for 500 miles wide and a thousand miles long.Indeed, in his introduction Wishart comments, "Modern geographers have also identified the absence of features as an integral part of the regional character of the Great Plains."In one sense it is true that there are no dramatic mountains or deep river gorges: indeed, the Great Plains region offers up a very subtle landscape.However, in another sense it is very much vmtrue: regions such as the Texas Staked Plains or the Nebraska Sandhills remain invisible in this text, and it is a great shame for such an extensive encyclopedic endeavor to reiterate this misconception.