KANSAS Outside the Watkins Museum of History in Lawrence, crowds
throng Massachusetts Street, the city’s downtown thoroughfare,
for a night of museum-and gallery-hopping during the Final
Friday art walk. A band plays in a parking lot across the
street, and the smoky smell of barbecue wafts sweetly on the
July breeze. Inside the nineteenth-century building, museumgoers
are reliving an earlier, less peaceful time in Lawrence
history—the turbulent 1850s and early 1860s, when the conflicts
between proslavery and antislavery forces were erupting in a war
of words and violence along the Kansas–Missouri border leading
up to the Civil War. “Tonight we gather for no small purpose: to
fight the Civil War and settle the thing once and for all,”
Jeremy Neely playfully tells an overflow audience in the museum
basement. “It is a point of pride—at least I know Missourians
say so—that this is where the Civil War started. So, take that,
South Carolina.” Neely, a history instructor at Missouri State
University, is introducing