America and the Great War: An ... - University of Kansas



America and the Great War: An Interdisciplinary Seminar in Literature and History

Dear Colleague,

Our NEH Summer Seminar for School Teachers will explore America's involvement with the First World War. Drawing on literature, history, and visual artifacts, we will look at the ways in which the Great War affected the United States (the “Home Front”), the nature of American participation in the War (the “War Front”), and how Americans represented, remembered, and memorialized the War in the decades following its ending in November 1918.

The Great War had a profound effect on world history. It shattered a century of relative peace, raising profound questions about human nature, politics, and progress that we are still dealing with. Communism, Nazism, the Second World War, the Holocaust, the Cold War, NATO, and the UN were only possible in its aftermath. Modern literature, modern art, and Freudian psychology developed or were popularized in its wake. For the first time, governments worked to integrate the War Front and the Home Front (concepts invented during the War), and at its end women in many nations received the vote. The mobilization of all aspects of science by governments, the alliance of the military and industry, the welfare state, and economic planning began during World War I. The War also changed forever how Western societies remember wars. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the endless listing of the names of ordinary soldiers, and national days of remembrance in almost every country in Europe and the English-speaking world date from the First World War. In many ways, then, the War has shaped our world down to the present.

Historians of the United States are now recognizing that the Great War is much more important to modern American history than has been thought—to put it differently, that the “great war” in modern American history may not be World War II. The Great War intersected with and influenced enormous post-Civil War changes in the United States: industrial expansion and technological innovation, the transition from a primarily rural to a predominantly urban society, huge waves of immigration from eastern and southern Europe, dramatic developments in transportation and communication, the campaign for women’s suffrage, the Great Migration of African-Americans from the south to industrial and commercial centers in the middle west and northeast, and the acquisition of colonies during the 1898 Spanish-American War. Pivotal components of America’s industrial and agricultural economy experienced dramatic growth because of the demands occasioned by American supply to belligerent nations long before the American Expeditionary Force sailed to France. The War impacted the Constitution, leading to women’s suffrage on the one hand but curtailing civil liberties on the other, with wartime passage of new Alien and Sedition Acts. Participation in the War gave the United States a place on the world stage for the first time, but also led to post-War isolationist restrictions on immigration. The War also increased the size and importance of the federal government, shifting the country’s center of power to Washington; dragged the American military into modernity; disrupted or destroyed progressive labor and social reforms; and introduced the United States to dramatic changes in literature and the visual and performing arts in which numerous Americans then played a role. Our five-week seminar will draw on this belated recognition.

One assumption of our seminar is that literature and history do not exist in a one-to-one correlation, but instead play off of each other in complex ways. Another is that war, a major human activity, is reflected in a great range of texts. We do not define war literature as synonymous with “battlefield” texts, because large-scale, mechanized, modern war affects a wide variety of people in complicated ways. Thus we will be working with female and male authors, canonical and little-known writing, texts set on and off the War Front, and written both during and after the War.

Seminar Highlights

We will begin with a buffet dinner and informal gathering at the home of Prof. Ted Wilson on Sunday, June 27, 2010, the night before the Seminar begins. Another highlight of Week I will be a field trip to the Liberty Memorial and National World War I Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, the only full-fledged institution in the United States entirely devoted to World War I (see Week I). The Museum holds the largest collection of World War I artifacts in the U.S., its only rival in the world being the Imperial War Museum in Britain, and presents the War as the beginning of America’s encounter with modem war and its entrance into global politics.

We will take a second field trip (Week II) to nearby Fort Leavenworth, originally a frontier outpost established in 1827, which, as the Command and General Staff College, has served for more than a century as the primary educational experience for U.S. Army officers selected for staff and command appointments. The CGSC trained the generation of officers who, having served in World War I, went on to higher command in World War II. Today the CGSC is considered to be the intellectual center of matters military. Fort Leavenworth, an open post, is a center for research and study. It offers the student of World War I a wealth of documentary materials (housed in the internationally-renowned Combined Arms Research Library), historic structures dating from the Great War, and artifacts in the Frontier Army Museum.

Two on-campus opportunities will be organized in conjunction with the Seminar. The first is an exhibit of World War I art. Prof. Steven Goddard, Senior Curator at the Spenser Museum of Art, is mounting a major exhibit entitled "Machine in a Void: World War I & the Graphic Arts" during spring semester 2010, and will remount a portion of it for the Seminar. During Week III we will view the exhibit as a group and also look at additional artifacts in his company. Finally, Prof. John Staniunas, who is Chair of Theatre and Film and a professional actor, will offer a summer season production of John E. Gray and Eric Peterson’s 1982 play Billy Bishop Goes to War, based on the life and memories of a famous Canadian World War I ace, in which he will take the lead (this involves playing fifteen different parts in addition to the title role). Participants will attend the performance of their choice.

During Week IV, we will be joined by Dr. Roger Spiller, an internationally-renowned historian whose focus is the history of military service in the United States Army in the 20th century. Prof. Spiller taught history for some twenty-five years at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College and served as the Distinguished George C. Marshall Professor of History from 1992 until his retirement in 2005. The author of five books and more than sixty articles and essays, Spiller is especially interested in the attitudes and effects of modern war, the portrayal of military service in visual media, and in intersections between history and literature.

We will ask the participants to work with and write a short report on a primary document as their special contribution to the Seminar. In the category of “document” we place a wide variety of materials. Examples might include a few interrelated propaganda posters; letters home from an AEF soldier; the dairy of a troop-ship doctor; a first-person memoir published by an obscure local press; an American children’s book in which the main character (which may be an animal) joins the war effort; pamphlets directed at housewives by the federal government; or Edith Wharton’s Book of the Homeless, which was printed in limited copies and sold to raise funds for relief efforts, and which has never been reprinted. KU’s libraries and art museum possess all of these and many more. For participants with transportation and desire, numerous documents are available at the National WWI Museum and the Combined Arms Research Library. Staff members at these institutions will explain their resources during our field trips. After an informal meal at Prof. Janet Sharistanian’s house during Week V, participants will discuss their work, which will also circulate among Seminar members in electronic format. At the close of the seminar, the Directors will present participants with letters stating that their efforts are the equivalent of three graduate credit hours at the University of Kansas.

Seminar Schedule (28 June-30 July 2010)

We will meet in a comfortable room in the new Hall Center for the Humanities building four afternoons a week for three hours of discussion, with the remainder of the week available for preparation, field trips, and other activities.

Week I: A Broad Overview of America and the Great War

The first week will provide an overview of our topic based on presentations by the Seminar co-directors and selected historical and literary readings. On the historical side, our major text will be Jennifer D. Keene’s compact The United States and the First World War (2000). Keene focuses on how the War changed American society, whether the government used its power appropriately during the War, whether the War would give America a permanent role in world affairs, and whether it was a just war for the U.S. (Keene, 2-3). We will employ readings from David Kennedy’s classic account of American society during World War I, Over Here:The First World War and American Society (25th anniversary ed., 2004) to expand upon themes presented in Keene’s overview. The excerpted material from his study sets the stage for later discussions by confronting such issues as the national mood on the eve of war, conflicting depictions of the war by writers and critics, and initial efforts to memorialize and give meaning to the sacrifice of those who served.

On the literary side, we will read a manageable selection of short fiction, poetry, and nonfiction prose that sets out some of the range and complexity of Americans’ political and personal responses to the Great War before and during U.S. participation in the conflict. Additionally, these readings represent traditional, popular, and more experimental literary forms, and some readings explicitly address what it means to write literature about war. These texts will include a few pages from social activist Jane

Addams’ “Women and Internationalism” and journalist Mary Roberts Rinehart’s “No Man’s Land”; short fiction by William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Edith Wharton; and poetry by Louise Bogan, Alfred Bryan, E.E. Cummings, Robert Frost, Amy Lowell, John McRae, Alan Seeger, Wallace Stevens, and Louis Untermeyer, among others.

Week I will end with a trip to the National World War I Museum and Liberty Memorial in Kansas City, , where we will view the collections, visit the original structures of the Memorial, meet with the archivist, and—for those with a tolerance for heights—take the elevator to the top of the 217-foot Memorial Tower. This trip will allow Seminar participants to view, hear, and experience literally thousands of unique artifacts from the War: ration books, machine guns, paperbacks to be read in the trenches, gas masks, recruitment posters, artillery pieces, wartime diaries, trenching tools, regimental banners, photos, films, paintings, and songs.

Week II: The United States Enters and Organizes for War

The Seminar’s second week focuses first on the story of how and why the U.S. entered the Great War, the effects of the Wilson administration’s stance with regard to neutral rights and duties, and the responses of Americans who wrote about these events. A second emphasis, elaborated via the readings, discussions, and the visit to Fort Leavenworth, will be consideration of dramatic changes in the relationship between the federal government and the public resulting from wartime mobilization.

Readings that illustrate the domestic and international political maneuvers that attended the drift toward war in spring, 1917 include excerpts from Robert H. Ferrell’s Woodrow Wilson and World War I (1986) and John Whiteclay Chambers’ To Raise an Army:The Draft Comes to Modern America (1987). Ronald Schaffer's America in the Great War:The Rise of the War Welfare State (1991) makes clear the Wilson administration’s efforts to coordinate the push for rapid economic development with corporate interests and its pendulum swings between appeals to patriotism, exhortations to sacrifice, threats of dire punishment, and outright coercion. The government’s attempts to mobilize popular support for the War are analyzed in excerpts from Stephen Vaughn’s insightful study of the Creel Committee, Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy, Nationalism, and the Committee on Public Information (1980), and Craig Campbell’s survey of government-sponsored propaganda films, Reel America and World War I (1985). We will also show clips from propaganda films discussed by Vaughn and Campbell.

Our literary reading for Week II will concentrate on Willa Cather’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, One of Ours (1922). One of Ours, which is based in part on the life of Cather’s cousin G. P. Cather, a member of the AEF who died in the Argonne Forest, as well as on soldiers’ diaries, letters, and conversations that Cather had with American veterans, is set on both the Home Front and the War Front, the two linked by a troop-ship voyage. Cather explores both differences and overlaps between “home” and “war” by focusing on a protagonist whose search for a sense of purpose in life eventually leads him to respond eagerly to the country’s call to arms. His reaction is fuelled in part by his revulsion toward the increasing materialism, mechanization, standardization, and intolerance of immigrants exhibited by his land-grabbing father and money-grubbing brothers and in part by his attraction to French culture and history, which he studied in college. Cather ends this novel with an ambiguous stance on the meaning of the war that both justifies and questions American participation in Europe’s conflict and thus makes for rich interpretation.

Week III: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Context of Wartime

Literary readings on race will include editorials, drama, poetry, and prose. W.E.B. DuBois will be well-represented in a series of editorials originally published in Crisis Magazine in which he first urged African Americans temporarily to ignore racial injustice and join in the national effort, but later expressed anger at the treatment of Black soldiers during and after the war. James Weldon Johnson’s “Why Should a Negro Fight?” (1918) provides a counterpoint to DuBois. Langston Hughes’s “The Colored Soldier” will be paired with Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s home front poem, “I Sit and Sew.” A group of 1918 poems by Lucien B. Watkins, Allen Tucker, and Mary P. Burrill exhibit sharp criticism of both war and government. Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die,” written following the “Red Summer” of 1919 when anti-black riots broke out in several cities, and Burrill’s short play, Aftermath, also 1919, which dramatizes an African-American soldier returning home only to learn that his father has been lynched, form another pair of readings. The African-American selections end with Melvin B. Tolson’s poem “A Legend of Versailles: An Ex-Judge at the Bar.”

Women’s work in wartime—and their objections to war—form a second cluster. Women’s work will be represented by Addie Hunton and Kathryn Johnson’s official report on “The Y.M.C.A. and Other Welfare Organizations” (1920), three stylistically-experimental short stories by writer and nurse Mary Borden, journalist Helen G. E. Mackay’s “Americans,” and two realist short stories by another nurse, Ellen Newbold LaMotte. Women’s protests against war will include journalist Corra Harris’s “Women of England and Women of France” (1914), which argues that “All wars are waged against women and children,” and Edna Saint Vincent Millay’s dramatic monologue, “Conscientious Objector.” We will also read poems written from the perspective of immigrant Americans and across a spectrum of political positions. These include

German-American intellectual and propagandist George Sylvester Viereck, mainstream writer Lurana Sheldon, and radical poet Arturo Giovannitti. We will ground the literary readings in excerpted material from historical works that treat similar issues. These readings will be contextualized by excerpted material from historical studies that treat similar issues. A selection from Nicholas Patter’s Jim Crow and The Wilson Administration (2004) will illustrate the experiences of African Americans caught in the contradictions of a system of officially-endorsed white domination, while material from William M. Tuttle’s Race Riot: Chicago in The Red Summer of 1919 (rev. ed., 1996) shows how pent-up tensions among African-Americans and whites fearful of radicalism exploded into violence in the aftermath of the war.

The roles played by women during wartime—surprisingly little-known—are depicted in Carrie Brown’s Rosie’s Mom: Forgotten Women Workers of The First World War (2002, excerpts). A quite different story is told in Kathleen Kennedy’s Disloyal Mothers and Scurrilous Citizens (1999, excerpts), which describes the activities of anarchists such as Emma Goldman and Kate Richards O’Hare. Finally, the experiences of first-and second-generation immigrants facing the trauma of war-induced separation from families and communities in Europe along with xenophobia, nativism, and pressures to “Americanize” are addressed in Christopher Sterba’s Good Americans: Italian and Jewish Immigrants in World War I (2003, excerpts).

Week IV: The Experience of Military Service

The focus of discussion for this week is the journey through the training camps, onto the troopships, and into the maelstrom of combat of the soldiers of the American Expeditionary Force. Excerpts from Mark E. Grotelueschen's comprehensive study, The AEF Way of War: The American Army in Combat in World War I (2006), and Robert H. Ferrell's case study of the preparation for and performance in combat of a National Guard Division, America's Deadliest Battle: Meuse-Argonne 1918 (2007), will dramatize the effort to convert an army of modest size and even less experience to the realities of modern warfare into the four million-strong force that was to be dispatched to France in time to avoid an Allied collapse.

The struggle to mobilize a nation for the demands of modern warfare generated enormous tensions in American society. The fraught questions of African-Americans and military service and appropriate roles to be played by women are treated in selections from Stephen Harris’s Harlem’s Hell Fighters: The African-American 369th Infantry in World War I (2005) and Kimberly Jensen’s Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War (2008).

Our literary text for this week will be Thomas Boyd’s compact Through the Wheat: A Novel of the World War I Marines (1923), which is based on Boyd’s wartime experience. At initial publication the novel was hailed by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson and favorably compared to war books by Crane and dos Passos. Since then Through the Wheat has fallen into relative obscurity, but its historicity, style, structure, and point of view are well worth examination. As noted above, our guest this week will be Prof. Roger Spiller, who will engage in discussion both of the American military history of the Great War and of Boyd’s novel.

Week V: War’s End and the Legacies of World War I

Any assessment of the outcome of World War I and of its legacies depends on the point in time and space from which these questions are considered. If one looks at outcomes and legacies from the perspective of an America celebrating the proclamation of the Armistice and the presumed overthrow of Prussian autocracy on November 11, 1918, it appeared that “the war to end all wars” had assured a peaceful and prosperous world order. If one shifts the focus to groups for whom the War brought both aspirations and frustrations, a wholly different sense emerges of its meaning and potential for basic change. Despite attempts to give the War and its legacies some fixed meaning through memorializations in stone, paper, film, and other media, shifts in perspectives on the Great War’s outcomes for America and the world have continued over the more than ninety years since President Wilson requested a Congressional declaration of war. The aim of this final week is to explore certain aspects of how and why World War I has been remembered as it has from the vantage of 2010.

Readings to provide context for discussion about how the War ended and why the U.S. chose to walk away from its progeny, the League of Nations, will take the form of excerpts from Margaret MacMillan’s Paris 1919: Six Weeks that Changed the World (2003) and John M. Cooper’s Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations (2001). Offering a guide through the thorny problems associated with “history” and “memory” is an excerpt from Jay Winter, Remembering War: The Great War through History and Memory in the Twentieth Century (2006).

The major literary text for this week will be John Dos Passos’ 1919 (1932), the second volume in his U.S.A. trilogy, in which the novelist intersperses newsreels, camera eyes, narratives of his characters, and biographies of famous historical figures in a modernist format that pits conflicting voices and viewpoints against each other. Constructing an examination of the war and its immediate aftermath in American society, Dos Passos shows in this landmark text not only that war interrupts everyday life and, having done so, becomes a cultural mentality as lives conform to resemble it, but finally that after as well as during war, life in America is a form of warfare between classes, races, and genders. The novel, which offers a political critique of war in relation to capitalism, is a highlight of American literary modernism and can be set into the historical contexts of socialism and labor around the time of the War.

Finally, we will read two brilliant “coda” texts: Tess Slesinger’s short story “The Times

So Unsettled Are,” which looks at the effects of the War from the vantage point of 1935 and through the eyes of an American and an Austrian couple, and World War II poet Randall Jarrell’s prose poem “1919” (1945), which morphs imagistically from the Great War to the Civil War to the Second World War and back to the First. As noted above, an informal gathering early in Week V will allow participants to discuss their documents.

Seminar Directors

Janet Sharistanian has taught courses on the literature and history of the Great War at undergraduate and graduate levels throughout her career, beginning at a time when there was only one other such course in the country. She has also given numerous papers on Great War literature at conferences in England, France, and the U.S. Her interest in the topic stems from a conviction that the Great War is inextricably tied up with literary creativity during the formative period of modern literature in the early twentieth century. One of Prof. Sharistanian’s major interests is women writers. She works extensively on Cather, Wharton, and Slesinger, all of whom were strongly affected by the War, as well as on other women writers such as Vera Brittain. She is completing a critica1 biography of Slesinger under contract with Atheneum Publishers, has edited two Cather novels for Oxford University Press, and has published on feminist theory and biography. Her current project is a book tentatively entitled “Home Front, War Front, History: American Literary Responses to the First World War.” She was the founding Director of KU’s Women’s Studies Program, directed its Research Institute on Women’s Public Lives, and edited and contributed to two scholarly volumes on women in the public domain. Prof. Sharistanian directed five NEH Summer Seminars for School Teachers entitled “American Women as Writers: Edith Wharton and Willa Cather” between 1994 and 2001.

Theodore A. Wilson, a member of the University of Kansas faculty since 1965, teaches U.S. military and diplomatic history. Over the past two decades his research and teaching have focused on America in the eras of World War I and World War II, especially the military experience of Americans during those conflicts. He has held visiting appointments at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, University College Dublin, and as Senior Research Fellow at the U.S. Army Center of Military History. Since 1986 he has been General Editor of the Modern War Studies series, which is published by the University Press of Kansas and now boasts some 220 original titles. Early in his career, Wilson began to work closely with teachers in National Defense Education Act institutes and programs, and he recently taught a graduate level course for secondary school teachers in a U.S. Department of Education-funded program. Wilson has directed some forty-five M.A. theses and more than forty Ph.D. dissertations in 20th century U.S. political, military, and diplomatic history. He has a book forthcoming on the organization and training of U.S. military forces from 1917 through 1945.

Institutional Context

About the University of Kansas

Spread out across 1,000 acres of rolling hills and tree-filled countryside, the University of Kansas offers an ideal setting for the 2010 NEH Great War Summer Seminar. Poet Walt Whitman once said of the view from Mount Oread, the highest point on campus: “Stretching out on its own unbounded scale, unconfined . . . combining the real and ideal, and beautiful as dreams.” A major educational and research institution, KU has more than 30,000 students, 2,400 faculty members, and a long tradition of excellence. Founded in 1865, KU first offered classes in 1866 and awarded its first graduate degree in 1895. The University of Kansas is accredited by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools and is classified by Carnegie as a Doctoral/Research University—Extensive. Serving as a center for learning, scholarship, and creative endeavor in Kansas and across the Midwest, the University has produced twenty-three Rhodes scholars, twenty-five Goldwater scholars, five Javits Fellows, eight Marshall scholars, twenty-two Mellon fellows, fifteen Truman scholars, six Udall scholars, one Churchill scholar and over four hundred Fulbright scholars.

While benefiting from the diverse culture and aesthetic beauty of the KU campus, participants will be learning about the literature and history of American involvement in World War I at the place where

• Basketball was invented

• Helium was first extracted from gas

• The man who discovered vitamins A and D graduated

• The first African American woman to entertain at the White House was a student

• Astronauts, presidential candidates, governors, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winners received their education

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The KU Library System

As a Summer Seminar participant, you will have full access to KU’s award-winning library system. Thirty-fifth in size among North American public and private research universities, the KU Library System contains more than 4.3 million volumes, thousands of manuscripts, photographic and archival pieces, and almost 350,000 maps and aerial photographs. Watson Library, the oldest and largest of the library facilities on campus, houses the Libraries' principal circulating materials in the humanities, social sciences, and professional fields of business, education, and journalism. Additionally, the Kenneth Spencer Research Library holds major archival, manuscript, and rare books collections.

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On-Campus Activities

The University of Kansas offers a broad array of cultural resources and activities for visiting individuals or families. Spencer Museum of Art contains eleven galleries and has a comprehensive collection of nearly 36,000 art works. Its holdings rank among the nation's premier university collections. The museum also houses the Murphy Art and Architecture Library. The Dole Institute of Politics, dedicated in 2003, is a bi-partisan institute committed to promoting political and civic involvement and to providing opportunities for the community to interact with political leaders, practitioners, and writers. It also houses the Dole Archives and Special Collections. KU’s Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center collections include seven million specimens that document the earth's biological diversity and natural environments.

The Hall Center for the Humanities

The Hall Center for the Humanities, which will provide logistical support for the Summer Seminar and its participants, is a designated research center at the University of Kansas with purpose-built facilities dedicated to the support of research in the humanities, arts, and social sciences and to the dissemination of that research to a broader public. The Center’s new building (renovated in 2005) will be the primary location for the Seminar. The two-story building has approximately 14,000 square feet of space and includes a 90-seat conference hall, a seminar room, and offices for research fellows and administrative staff. The design of the new Center preserves and utilizes the nine limestone arches from the south façade of the old KU powerhouse. The Center will arrange for on-campus housing, meal plans, and campus tours, and will secure

Visiting scholar status for participants in the Seminar.

About Fort Leavenworth and the Combined Arms Research Library (CARL)

Leavenworth is a community of approximately 35,000 people located in the rolling hills of northeastern Kansas on the Missouri River. Leavenworth is on the outskirts of the Kansas City metropolitan area and is home to Fort Leavenworth, Saint Mary College, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and the Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. Leavenworth has a historic, small-town atmosphere with access to the amenities of a larger city. In addition to the large federal presence and large private employers such as Hallmark Cards, the Leavenworth community is home to many smaller, family-owned businesses. Downtown Leavenworth still contains many of the buildings that were present in the early 1900's, and vintage homes are scattered throughout the community.

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The Combined Arms Research Library (CARL), a comprehensive military research center, is part of the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. It also serves as the post library for the Fort Leavenworth community. CARL’s mission is to support the College's instructional and research programs through ownership of or access to appropriate print and computerized resources; to provide assistance to Fort Leavenworth and other Department of Defense (DOD) offices and installations in their search for useful information resources; and to promote the better understanding of effective ways to use these resources by soldiers, their families, and DOD civilians.

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About the City of Lawrence

Renowned for its rich history and vibrant culture, Lawrence is a community of roughly 90,000 located forty miles west of downtown Kansas City and twenty-five miles east of Topeka, the Kansas state capital. Lawrence was founded in the 1850s chiefly by “Free Staters,” settlers sponsored by Amos Lawrence and the New England Emigrant Aid Society. In its earliest incarnation, Lawrence was a small outpost of abolitionists huddling on the slopes above the Kansas River. It was at the center of the conflict known as “Burning Kansas” and thus played a pivotal role in the coming Civil War. Having arisen from the ashes after being burned and pillaged by William Quantrill’s raiders in August of 1863, Lawrence secured its future three years later by winning the bid for the first public university when Kansas achieved statehood. Though many had hoped Lawrence would become the new state capital or at the very least be assigned the state prison, over time Lawrencians became reconciled to the university atop “Mount Oread,” a hogback ridge rising ninety feet above the Kansas River bluffs.

Over one hundred and fifty years later, Lawrence is flourishing, celebrating its diversity, and doggedly protecting its identity as a political and cultural oasis against the westward march of the Kansas City metropolitan area. In addition to being consistently rated as one of the most scenic college towns in America, Lawrence boasts a number of prestigious accomplishments, ranging from being recognized as a Distinctive Destination by the National Trust for Historic Preservation to being ranked 12th among U.S. cities by the National Endowment for the Arts as having the largest percentage of professional artists in the workforce. A feature in the National Geographic Traveler best summarized Lawrence’s uniqueness when it proclaimed: “Set in undulating green hills, with public artwork on every corner, the vibrant college town of Lawrence blows the Kansas-is-flat-and-boring stereotype right out of the water.” With its variety of boutiques, galleries, coffee houses, bistros and bars along “Mass Street” (the city’s historic downtown district), Lawrence possesses a unique ambiance guaranteed to charm and captivate its visitors.

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About the Greater Kansas City Area

Since Lawrence is located 40 miles from downtown Kansas City, participants will be only a short drive away from many of that city’s main attractions. Whether you are interested in listening to local jazz artists or strolling down the boulevards of the Country Club Plaza, Kansas City offers participants a wide range of cultural activities, including jazz clubs, barbeque restaurants, parks, and museums. Experience Kansas City jazz with your seminar colleagues at Jardine’s Restaurant, a cozy jazz club and restaurant located in the heart of Kansas City’s historic midtown. Shop and dine in Westport, one of the city’s premier destinations for dining, shopping, and sightseeing. Or visit the latest exhibits at Kansas City’s largest art gallery, the internationally acclaimed Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Most importantly, Kansas City is home to the only full-fledged institution in the U.S. devoted to World War I, the National World War I Museum at Liberty Memorial.

To learn more about what Kansas City has to offer, please visit the following websites:

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Getting Here

Lawrence is conveniently located on Interstate 70 about 45 minutes west of Kansas City and 20 minutes east of Topeka, the state capital. The most convenient airport is Kansas City International Airport (MCI), located north of Kansas City and an hour-plus drive to Lawrence. All of the main rental car companies have offices at MCI and pickup and drop-off are relatively painless. MCI is served by such major airlines as American, Continental, Delta, Frontier, Midwest, Northwest, Southwest, United, and US Airways. Shuttle service to and from Lawrence is available from several operators at reasonable rates. For a complete list of shuttle and cab services please visit: .

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