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"Like everyone else, she was taught that the earth and the other planets circled the sun, but deep down she had the feeling that the sun and the rest of the cosmos really revolved around western Kansas," James Dickenson writes of his grandmother Mary Phipps, who lived her 91 years in Kansas. "She took as the First Principle that bread, the staff of life, was one of the bases of existence itself, along with air and water. From this flowed the inescapable conclusion that wheat farmers were truly engaged in the Lord's work." These words open the book Home on the Range, in which Dickenson, for three decades a top national political reporter, starts with his own family and boyhood in Rawlins County to explain how Kansas came to be what it was, and how it is ceasing to be that and becoming something else.

But Kansas has always been quintessentially American, which is not to say entirely placid or entirely unflavorful. In 1989, when Russia's Yevgeny Primakov wanted to see "real Americans," he flew out with Bob Dole to Dodge City, to visit Boot Hill Museum and the Long Branch Saloon. Kansas, like so much of Russia, may look quiet, full of solid farmers who work hard and have deep roots in the soil, the place around which the cosmos revolves. But Kansas's history, like Russia's, has also been punctuated by uprisings, intellectual and violent, by moments of anger and rage sweeping through the tall sheaves like a tornado wind. The difference, of course, is that Russian traditions of law and liberty, culture and civility are weak, while in Kansas, as in all America, they are remarkably strong.

Kansas literally began in a moment of violence, the Bleeding Kansas of the 1850s that led proximately to the terrible war that split the whole nation. The trigger was the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which left to local settlers the question of whether this new Kansas Territory would be a free or slave state. Pro-slavery "bushwhackers" rode over the line from Missouri, stealing elections and writing a pro-slavery constitution. But much larger numbers of free-soil "jayhawkers" from New England and the New England-Yankee-settled Great Lakes states put down roots and, despite the massacres of the mad John Brown, prevailed and established their own law and order. The effect on national politics was tumultuous: The Democratic Party was split, the Republican Party was created, and the nation was plunged into Civil War. The effect on Kansas was calming: The anti-slavery majority bent the soil to the plow and built small towns thick with schools, churches and colleges, to the point that in the 1939 color movie, Wizard of Oz, the Kansas scenes were shot in dreary black and white as the image of dull, prim, old-fashioned Middle America. But the rebellious impulse did not totally die out. Kansans' livelihoods were always at risk: Hailstorms, grasshopper invasions, dry seasons or a drop in world farm prices could mean disaster for thousands. The high-rainfall 1880s attracted hundreds of thousands of new settlers to Kansas; the low-rainfall 1890s produced a bust and a populist rebellion. "What you farmers should do," said orator Mary Ellen Lease, "is to raise less corn and more hell." For a few years in the 1890s, and then in farm rebellions of the 1930s, 1950s and 1970s, Kansans did, but afterwards always returned to jayhawker Republicanism.

Kansas remains Republican in the 21st century, but not in quite the same old way. Its most famous politician, Bob Dole, still returns occasionally to his small hometown of Russell, out on the plains. But Kansas' population is increasingly metropolitan. Half of Kansans live in just five counties, which include Kansas City, Lawrence, Topeka and Wichita, and in most of the other 100 counties population is declining. A majority of Kansans lives in or within easy reach of metropolitan Kansas City, which has a diverse economy that is by no means dependent on farming. While small towns on the plains see their city halls and post offices padlocked, new office complexes and corporate headquarters are rising amidst the affluent suburbs of Johnson County, which has one of the highest job growth rates in the country. The smaller metropolitan area of Wichita, while less diversified, has an economy built on its role as the world's leading producer of small airplanes: Here Boeing, Cessna, Bombardier, Raytheon and other manufacturers make 69% of the general aviation aircraft in the world, and 60% of its aviation sales are exports. Kansas is wired to the world, its unemployment rate is low. Hispanics are flocking to work in meatpacking factories in towns like Dodge City, Garden City and Liberal, whose populations in 2000 were more than 40% Hispanic; Hispanics accounted for nearly half of Kansas's population growth in the 1990s. There is no warrant today for shooting the Kansas scenes in a movie in black and white.

This transformation has had political consequences. Some 39% of Kansas's votes in 2000 were cast in the mostly suburban counties from Kansas City west to Topeka, and another 15% in Wichita's Sedgwick County. If rural Kansas once produced farm rebellions, these urban and suburban Kansans have produced their own kind of rebellion. In 1992, 27% of Kansans voted for Ross Perot--his fifth best showing in the nation--and his vote was heaviest not in the wheat country but from just at the edge of metropolitan expansion and in the sparsely populated Flint Hills, places where young families live, commuting to jobs and shopping malls 50 or even 100 miles away. Much of the politics of Kansas in the last decade has been a struggle within the Republican party between followers of Governor Bill Graves, elected in 1994 and 1998, who favored abortion rights and gun control, and Christian conservatives who take the opposite stand. Graves beat back a conservative challenge in the 1998 Republican primary by nearly a 3-1 margin, but the conservatives have won legislative leadership posts and control of the party organization. The ultimate beneficiaries have been Kansas Democrats. They captured the 3d Congressional District seat in 1998 by beating a conservative who was hated by Republican moderates and in 2002 they captured the governorship in the same way. This was not completely out of character: Republican Kansas has had Democratic governors for 20 of the preceding 36 years.

But Kansas has not moved toward Democrats in national politics. In 2000 it voted 58%-37% for George W. Bush. Voters in Kansas's metropolitan areas showed little of the allegiance to Clinton-Gore Democrats seen in the bigger metro areas of the Northeast and West Coast, and voters in rural areas were less interested in getting higher government subsidies than in preventing government interference of the sort threatened by the Clinton EPA plan to regulate the water runoff from farms and to regulate privately owned lakes and farm ponds. The two Republican senators elected in 1996 (there was a special election to replace Bob Dole) have both been reelected by wide margins, Sam Brownback in 1998 and Pat Roberts in 2002; Kansas has not elected a Democratic senator since 1932--the only state that hasn't. Three of the state's four House seats have gone to Republicans essentially uncontested, although Democrats represented two of them in the 1980s and early 1990s.