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.