Prominent Kansas historian Virgil Dean has gathered a distinguished team of writers--Thomas Isern and Craig Miner among them--who have crafted incisive portraits of twenty-seven notable men and women, including radical abolitionist John Brown; wheat king Theodore C. Henry; women's rights activist Clarina Nichols; William Allen White, the "Sage of Emporia"; President Dwight D. Eisenhower; Esther Brown, who challenged segregation in public schools; political icon Bob Dole; Gordon Parks, photographer, filmmaker, and author of The Learning Tree; and visionary environmentalist Wes Jackson.