Category: Kinsley, Kansas
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Long before Charlie Edwards produced Shakespeare for thousands, the plays had already become part of everyday life on the Great Plains.
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Today’s post is the beginning of this story, and the beginning of a cultural history. It starts with Eugene Edwards, Charlie Edwards’s father, his arrival in Kansas, and how he built a local business empire.
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This project sits at the intersection of community theatre, rural cultural history, and queer history. Presented as an open-access, public-facing history, it seeks to recover the forgotten stories, overlooked people, and local artistic movements that helped shape American cultural life.
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So what was it, a stage or a forest? Some even believed that maybe, just maybe, the toddler actors were not children at all but, rather, fairies.
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100 years ago today, a prolific and remarkable era in history ended in Kinsley, Kansas. On June 1, 1926, one of Kinsley’s most well-known native sons, Charles Rufus Edwards, passed away; he was only forty-five years old. In his short…
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I had one advantage: this Victorian cabinet photo was taken at the studio of D. H. Atkins in Kinsley, Kansas. This proprietor only operated in town from November 1890 to March 1891, providing a short window for when the image…
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After acquiring the original copy of this photo, I was resolved to determine who the men were; one of them looked familiar, but I wasn’t sure exactly why or how I would recognize him. However, first, why were these three…
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How a brief reference in a doctoral dissertation tucked away in the labyrinthine stacks at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, led me to Charlie Edwards’ story, six years ago, would have been easy to forget if it had…
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When I arrived at the Huntington Library on the third of April 2019, I was searching for details to include in my dissertation, Grassroots Shakespeare, on amateur Shakespeare performance in the United States.
Community Arts Uncovered 