Lawrence may appear to some to be an idyllic college town, but it’s seen plenty of blood and turmoil in its 150 years.

From the notorious 1863 Quantrill’s Raid to the violent social unrest of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the city repeatedly has been a flash point in national-scale conflicts. Ironically, in a city that prides itself on anti-slave heritage, many of the major crimes and disruptions have been tied to racial and ethnic strife.

The four-hour killing spree on Aug. 21, 1863, led by Quantrill’s pro-slavery guerrilla forces is considered by many to be one of the worst atrocities in the nation’s history. More than 100 men and boys were killed in the raid.

Paul Stuewe, a history teacher at Lawrence High School, gives tours of the modern-day sites where people were killed in the raid. They include a city parking garage on New Hampshire Street and the basketball court at Buford M. Watson Jr. Park, which was once a brush-filled gully where some men went to hide.

He believes the raid and the rebuilding effort might have helped foster a “fighting spirit” in Lawrence’s citizens that remains today.

“We are not exactly like the rest of the state,” he said. “I think some of that independence goes back to our beginning.”

But Lawrence didn’t always live up to its free-spirited legacy. One example was the lynching of three black men on June 10, 1882, who were suspected of the murder of a white man.

According to media reports at the time, a mob armed with sledgehammers and chisels stormed the jail, marched the men to the Kansas River Bridge and hanged them.

“We deplore mob law under all circumstances,” the Lawrence Western Home Journal editorialized. “But if there ever was a case that was justifiable, this is one of them.”

Local historian Steve Jansen said the lynchings were a reminder that not all “free-staters” were abolitionists. Many opposed slavery for economic reasons, not moral reasons.

“Even when Lawrence stood for freedom, it was the white man’s freedom,” he said. “The vast majority of free-staters here didn’t identify with the plight of African-Americans.”

Another example of the dark side of the city’s history, Jansen said, was the widespread anti-German propaganda in the World War I era that drove a local businessman to commit suicide.

And although it’s evolved into a four-year university, Haskell Indian Nations University began as a school designed to institutionalize and assimilate American Indians. Many in the city’s American Indian community still are furious about the police shooting of Gregory Sevier in 1991, still considered a racially motivated murder by some people even though a coroner’s inquest found the shooting was justified.

Throughout the middle of the century, racial segregation remained prevalent. One example was the Jayhawk Plunge, a segregated swimming pool that was the subject of a picketing campaign in the 1960s.

The late 1960s and early 1970s brought what Police Chief Ron Olin has described as a period of “incredible social unrest.” Anti-war and civil-rights protest groups flourished, and it was in this era that a “60 Minutes” feature on hemp-picking outlaws dubbed Lawrence the country’s marijuana capital.

In April 1970, an arson fire caused $1 million in damage to the Kansas Union, a crime Jansen said stood out from others in the city’s past because of the scale of its destructiveness. Then, in a four-day period in July 1970, two young men, Rick “Tiger” Dowdell and Nick Rice, died of gunshot wounds after confrontations with police — who frequently came under sniper fire themselves.

Dowdell, who was black, was shot and killed by an officer in the alley off Ninth Street between Rhode Island and New Hampshire streets. Rice died of a bullet to the skull after police fired on a disturbance near 12th Street and Oread Avenue, but it was never conclusively determined who killed him.

“Lawrence has had its triumphs, and it’s had its repetition of national patterns of discrimination,” Jansen said. “It doesn’t make us bad. It doesn’t make us good. It just makes us like most communities in the United States.”