Acknowledgments
It is an old chestnut that scholarship is a collective enterprise, but that does not make it any less true for this book. I have benefited from a vast supporting cast of other researchers, librarians, colleagues, students, friends, and family over the years of working on it.
Research for this project began in earnest during a sabbatical in the fall of 2011 from the University of Kansas (KU), coupled with a generous grant from the Spencer Foundation, which permitted me to continue working into the following spring and summer months. Aaron Tyler Rife was an intrepid assistant and companion, traveling daily to area libraries and archives, and assisting with interviews and statistical data collection. His work was integral to the project’s success, and he extended it with his own dissertation focusing on the Hickman Mills School District.
Aaron and I received vital assistance from librarians and archivists throughout the course of our work. This was especially true of the staff of the Missouri Valley Collections at the Kansas City Public Library and the Kansas City Research Center of the State Historical Society of Missouri, located on the campus of the University of Missouri at Kansas City (formerly known as the Western Historical Collection). We spent months examining materials in these extensive local history collections. Reference librarians at the University of Kansas also provided assistance, especially regarding government (census) documents and the T. R. Smith Map Collection; staff members at the university’s Kenneth Spencer Research Library also helped with a number of particular searches.
We conducted a good deal of research in other locations as well. Librarians at the Johnson County Library System’s Central Resource Library were quite helpful, as were archivists at the Johnson County Museum. The same was true of librarians at the Kansas Historical Museum in Topeka. The Raytown Historical Society’s volunteer staff helped to identify pertinent material in its collections, as did volunteers at the Clay County Historical Society and Museum in Liberty, Missouri. The records department at the Kansas State Department of Education located pertinent school reports and other documents, as did a number of very helpful staff members in the administrative offices of the North Kansas City School District. Librarians at Park University helped locate elusive Missouri School Reports, and librarians at Shawnee Mission North High School aided us in finding materials pertinent to its history.
Individual-level census data were acquired from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) sponsored by the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota. I am very grateful for the availability of this vital resource for quantitative historical research. Social Explorer helped in identifying census tract data and larger spatial patterns of inequality.
Later in the project Jennifer Hurst also provided valuable assistance in locating additional sources in online databases and KU’s libraries. Cartographer Darin Grauberger prepared the maps for chapters 2 through 5; Xan Wedel created maps for the epilogue at KU’s Institute for Policy and Social Research, where a highly capable staff managed the project’s grant funds. Xan also helped identify data sources for the epilogue’s analysis of poverty and achievement.
In other regards this study has benefited enormously from the work of scholars who also have written about the history of greater Kansas City. I am especially indebted to Sherry Lamb Schirmer, Joshua Dunn, Peter William Moran, Kevin Fox Gotham, and perhaps most of all James R. Shortridge, for their foundational contributions to the social and economic history of postwar Kansas City and the development of its school systems in particular. Citations throughout the book testify to this, even if I do not always agree with their interpretations or explanations of particular events.
Over the past six years I have presented papers based on this project at various meetings, including those sponsored by the History of Education Society (USA), the American Educational Research Association, the International Standing Conference of the History of Education, and the Social Science History Association. Discussants and audience members in each of these venues provided very helpful feedback, especially Dionne Danns, Ansley Erickson, Karen Benjamin, Jack Dougherty, Tracy Steffes, Emily Strass, Hilary Moss, Walter Stern, Ken Gold, and David Gamson, among many others. I have also presented chapters in various stages of preparation in the Urban Experience Seminar at KU’s Hall Center for the Humanities. I found additional responses helpful there and at other venues on campus, particularly from Clarence Lang, Marie-Alice L’Heureux, Bradley Lane, Argun Saatcioglu, Shirley Hill, Shawn Alexander, Bill Tuttle, David Roediger, Steve Obenhaus, Nathan Wood, Barney Warf, Donna Ginther, Derrick Darby, ChangHwan Kim, Jake Dorman, Bill Staples, Bob Antonio, Alan Black, and other colleagues and students too numerous to mention. I also benefited from conversations with Kansas City broadcast journalist Sam Zeff, who offered insightful perspective as well.
Parts of chapter 2 were presented at a 2013 conference on quantitative approaches to the history of education at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, and similar presentations also were made at the University of Vienna, the University of Szeged, Soka University of America, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Arizona State University, and the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Useful questions and commentary were offered in each of those instances too, and I am grateful to hosts Daniel Tröhler and Catherina Schreiber, Reka Cristian, Jay Heffron, Bill Reese, Sherman Dorn, and Sylvia Mendez respectively for their hospitality and helpful feedback.
I also received helpful critiques from anonymous readers who reviewed various papers for publication in academic journals. I have benefited enormously from my coauthors on these and other articles that have informed the study, including Sanae Akaba, Aaron Rife, Argun Saatcioglu, and Donna Gardner. Donna’s work was especially important in chapter 4. Several publishers considered the book, and their reviewers offered many suggestions for revision. Ben Justice, Dionne Danns, Zoe Burkholder, Bob Hampel, and Jon Zimmerman provided especially valuable feedback on the manuscript as a whole, and Cornell University Press editor Michael McGandy adeptly shepherded the book to publication. Copyediting was very capably performed by Glenn Novak, and production editor Jennifer Savran Kelly managed the transition to print. Hannah Bailey expertly created the index.
Friends, students, and colleagues in Lawrence have been supportive throughout the project, and they have continued to express interest in its findings. This has been especially true in my home department and school, where colleagues and students have endured with unfailing good humor my absences for research and writing. Dean Rick Ginsberg has been a staunch source of support.
Finally, I would like to express heartfelt thanks to my spouse and partner, Aïda Alaka, who has been steadfast in her encouragement of my scholastic predilections, including this long-gestating book. Despite having her own demanding academic career, she has been an invaluable sounding board for many aspects of the project and a fount of encouragement to keep moving forward.
The book is dedicated to my mother, Virginia Gould Rury, who taught me much about inequality and injustice, lessons that have resonated throughout my life and career.
Portions of the following articles have been used in the book with permission from the editors and publishers, for which I am also grateful: “Race, Schools and Opportunity Hoarding: Evidence from a Post-war American Metropolis,” History of Education 47, no. 1 (January 2018): 87–107 (with Aaron Tyler Rife); “Trouble in Suburbia: Localism, Schools and Conflict in Postwar Johnson County, Kansas,” History of Education Quarterly 55, no. 2 (May 2015): 133–63; and “The Geo-spatial Distribution of Educational Attainment: Cultural Capital and Uneven Development in Metropolitan Kansas City, 1960–1980,” Histoire & Mesure 29, no. 1 (2014): 219–46 (with Sanae Akaba).