| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 36.4

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 36.4 | The History Cooperative

*Cities on the Plains: The Evolution of Urban Kansas*. By James R. Shortridge. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. xiv + 480 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00.)
A labor of love by a leading historical geographer of the Midwest, Cities on the Plains buries us in a Kansas blizzard of details about the development of the state's urban areas. The book is exhaustive, and it can be exhausting. But it is undeniably a major contribution to Great Plains historiography and to our understanding of how American urban systems evolved over time.	1
The book is not intended to be a comprehensive urban history of Kansas. Shortridge has little to say about urban infrastructure, for example, or about the internal dynamics of communities. Towns, not neighborhoods or social groups, are his basic units of analysis, and he is most interested in how those towns related to one another functionally and spatially—in short, why Kansas's system of cities mapped out as it did. Why did settlements flourish in certain places but not others? How and when did the "rules of the game" change, allowing a few towns to grow into major metropolitan areas, while others, despite their boosters' glorious predictions, never became more than county seats? What specialized functions did various cities take on, and how did they reach their positions in Kansas's "urban hierarchy"—its population rankings and economic pecking order?	. . .

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