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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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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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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?
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Martin Luther King, Jr. would start 1968 — one of the most tumultuous years in American history — with an event at Kansas State University. Just months before his assassination, the speech was his last on a college campus.
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This weekend's playoff matchup is reigniting memories of a 1971 divisional game that included two overtimes and more than 22 minutes of extra time.
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On Jan. 11, also known as Missouri Emancipation Day, the Missouri History Museum is bringing new attention to an antebellum insurrection plot that was secretly devised by free Black Americans in St. Louis — and how an insubordinate war hero ticked off Lincoln with his antics to free enslaved Missourians during the Civil War.
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In the late 1970s, a group of musicians in Topeka, Kansas, formed what became one of the first all-women mariachi bands in the country. Mariachi Estrella broke down barriers in a male-dominated music scene, before a deadly disaster almost ended the group for good. Decades later, the band’s descendants are ensuring their legacy shines on into the future.
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When hip-hop hit Kansas City streets, the effect was immediate. The new sound took over record stores, local high schools and underground dance parties. As the country celebrates 50 years of the art form, Kansas City honors its own contributions to the culture.
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A college professor with Kansas City roots is highlighting the city's influence in LGBTQ+ history and the national gay bar scene. Lucas Hilderbrand says the city was a nexus for gay political activity, activism and culture.
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Several universities, including Wichita State, claim that football's first forward pass was thrown at their school. Who's right?
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"The Day After" made use of 2,000 local extras alongside well-known actors of the time. The film's emotional impact made it into the pages of a presidential journal, and is widely credited for putting the brakes on the nuclear arms race.
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Kansas City has its fair share of historic homes, odd churches and menacing mansions, each with their own haunting past. With unsolved murders to unexplained mysteries, these sites are perfectly creepy and fascinating even beyond the Halloween season.
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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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Before Patrick Mahomes or Josh Allen made their names as ball-slingers who could also sprint, Bobby Douglass and Steve Grogan were using their legs to find ways to win football games.
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After a former mayor spent $144,000 of public money on the synthetic saxophone, it became the centerpiece of a Kansas City institution. A reissued recording of the instrument, played by our greatest bebopper, was released last month.
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Some of the very first homes in Kansas were built by members of the Wichita Tribe with cut bundles of native bluestem grass. A new generation of students at Haskell Indian Nations University are learning the skill, and reconnecting with a Great Plains tradition.
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While the Kansas City region is home to robust public library systems, it also boasts specialized libraries that focus on individual subjects. These libraries have extensive collections devoted to arts, natural history, science and storytelling, and also offer events, activities, and exhibits for readers and researchers alike.
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Kansas was years ahead of most of the country in granting women full suffrage. A prank by a few men backfired when Susanna Madora Salter was elected mayor of Argonia, Kansas, in 1887.
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Twenty-two Kansas City-based Latino artists spent close to a year curating an exhibit called “A Layered Presence.” It is the third installment of the KC Art Now initiative to display more local work in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.