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John R. Kelso and Jesse James: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Politics of Memory
When Jesse James was shot and killed in 1882 by a member of his own gang, he was already a national celebrity.…
Kelso and Anarchism
In early May 1886, at Haymarket Square in Chicago, workers rallied for an eight-hour workday and to protest a police shooting that had killed a reported six strikers the day before..…
Kelso and the Impeachment of President Andrew Johnson
Kelso’s 39th [Congress] would hold its second session from December 3, 1866, to March 3, 1867. A few days after Radicals held a late November torchlight procession and political rally in Springfield[, Missouri], Kelso headed for Washington…
The Wild West: Modesto, California
(Adapted from Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy, 353-60).
L. C. Branch’s History of Stanislaus County, California, published in 1881, was an elaborate production: a folio volume printed on fine paper, it included eight maps …
Cross-Dressing Civil War Soldiers?
On the long march to Pea Ridge in January 1862, Kelso often saw infantrymen straggling from the ranks, looking for food. One day he saw some of them swarm an apple cellar, crowding in so tightly that he worried some might get trampled or…
John R. Kelso and “The Movement Westward”
The Midwestern Regionalist painter John Steuart Curry (1897-1946) probably never heard of John R. Kelso. Certainly he wasn’t thinking of Kelso in 1937 when he was painting his mural on the fifth floor of the Department of Justice Building in…
Images of John R. Kelso
Kelso left behind little besides his voluminous writings. His five books: The Real Blasphemers (1883); The Bible Analyzed in Twenty Lectures (1884); Spiritualism Sustained in Five Lectures (1886); The Universe Analyzed (1887); and Deity Analyzed…