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Missouri has the most miles of the Cherokee Trail of Tears, and Steelville is on its path. Archaeologist Erin Whitson has been working to verify Cherokee encampment sites in town, in the hopes that they will be recognized and protected.
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Thousands of people took over the small town of Sedalia, Missouri, in 1974 for the Ozark Music Festival, a party full of nudity, drugs and rock 'n roll music. People still talk about the lore from that hot wild weekend. Depending on what side of the festival fence you were on, it was three days of heaven — or three days of hell.
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Hannibal, Missouri, is a perfect weekend destination that celebrates the life and literature of Samuel Clemens, AKA Mark Twain. You can also find other notable historic sites, plenty of events and festivals, and caves worth exploring.
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Once strong and thriving, Clayton’s Black community was wiped out by urban renewal policies that drove out several hundred residents during the 1950s and '60s. Now the city's downtown business district stands in its place.
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Kansas City’s central location and easy access to rail travel, along with Missouri’s simplified adoption laws favoring secrecy, attracted prospective parents from around the U.S. Over the first part of the 20th century, more than a dozen homes for unwed mothers flourished, the largest and most well-known of which was The Willows.
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Lead plaintiff Oliver Brown's name rings loudest from the 1954 Brown v. Board desegregation case, but 12 women fought alongside him in Topeka. Kansas Historical Society curator Donna Rae Pearson's "Women of Brown" exhibit helps tell their story.
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The landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that outlawed racial segregation in public schools may have played out differently if it hadn’t been for a tenacious group of women in Johnson County, Kansas, who led their own integration lawsuit five years earlier. The case centered around a two-room schoolhouse and included a lengthy boycott, big-shot NAACP lawyers, FBI surveillance — and six very brave children.
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Lawrin was owned by Herbert Woolf, the president of Woolf Brothers, one of the most important clothing stores in Kansas City history. Woolf also had an odd connection to political boss Tom Pendergast.
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Kansas City native Edward J. Dwight Jr. is set to be on the next Blue Origin rocket into space. The rare opportunity comes more than six decades after he was passed over to become a NASA astronaut.
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Business owners have campaigned for nearly two years to sever Troost Avenue from its slaveholding past. But the effort has hit a bureaucratic roadblock, as Mayor Quinton Lucas tries to avoid another public controversy like the failed renaming of The Paseo.
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Once seen as a musical relic, audio cassettes have survived the eras of CDs and streaming to win over music lovers of a new generation. That’s in large part thanks to the National Audio Company in Springfield, Missouri, the largest cassette manufacturer in the world.
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Would the Chiefs and Royals really leave Kansas City if the sales tax vote fails? History says maybeRepresentatives of the Chiefs and Royals have suggested they would consider other “options” if Jackson County voters don't approve a sales tax to help fund a downtown ballpark and upgrade Arrowhead. It's not inconceivable that a professional sports team would leave Kansas City — because it's happened before.
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If Jackson County voters feel conflicted about the April 2 stadium sales tax vote to help finance a new downtown ballpark for the Royals and Arrowhead Stadium improvements for the Chiefs, they can be confident in this: political fights over stadiums is a local tradition that goes back at least 93 years.
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Missouri, which earned the infamous nickname of "meth capital of America," played a key role in the drug's spread across the country. A new podcast tells that story.
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Kansas City has long been associated with barbeque, fountains and jazz music — but accordions? Not so much. Still, Kansas City has a rich accordion history thanks to Joan Cochran Sommers, an icon who is still conducting, teaching and playing the accordion.
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Harris-Kearney Museum to reopen after renovations to tell the 'full story' of Kansas City's foundingAfter 18 months of renovations, the historic Westport home will serve again as a center for stories from the old western frontier. 'We need to tell the story of enslavement and the Native American tribes that were affected by the settlement,' one historian says.
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The Kansas City business leader and rancher left a lasting legacy in the Flint Hills and helped redevelop Kansas City’s West Bottoms. He died on Thursday.
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In the 1970s and '80s, students at the universities of Kansas and Missouri protested on-campus to demand their institutions divest from a racist government in South Africa. Now, they’re asking schools to withdraw funds that support Israel's war in the Gaza Strip.
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A pair of exhibits at the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence are inspired by the life and death of Emmett Till, which helped launch the civil rights movement. The work of area textile artists helps connect the 1955 killing to contemporary violence against Black people.
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The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum accepted on Thursday the remnants of the vandalized statue. The cleats will be added to an existing exhibit about the first Black American to break Major League Baseball’s color barrier.
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Around the Kansas City region, living history museums like Missouri Town and Shawnee Town reveal how people lived in earlier eras, with collections of historic buildings, demonstrations of period crafts, and stories of the people who lived there.
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Matt Stewart's "The Kansas City Royals: An Illustrated Timeline" was a chance to revisit forgotten stories about the team and get them in print for posterity.
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Up until a few weeks ago, Lynette Woodard from the University of Kansas had scored more points in college basketball than any woman ever. But she was never recognized by the NCAA as a scoring champion.
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Oreo is the best-selling cookie in the world today. But few people remember the product that Nabisco blatantly ripped off: Hydrox. A creation of Kansas City’s Loose-Wiles Biscuit Company, Hydrox was billed as the “aristocrat of cookies,” with a novel combo of chocolate and cream filling. So why, more than a century later, is Hydrox still mistaken as a cheap knockoff?