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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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After dying suddenly under mysterious circumstances, Kansas City philanthropist Thomas Swope became the focus of one of the most publicized murder trials of the early 20th century. It’s long been suspected that Swope’s nephew-in-law murdered him and other members of his family as part of a plot to steal their fortune — but the events remain unresolved more than 110 years later.
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Three St. Louis-area locations have been added to the National Park Service's National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom for their connections to enslaved people.
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On Tuesday, three U.S. House representatives, two Democrats and one Republican, introduced a bill to make the site of the historic town of Quindaro in Kansas City, Kansas, a National Historic Landmark. The town was once a stop on the Underground Railroad and a thriving multicultural community.
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Dred Scott, the enslaved man whose case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, is getting a new memorial monument. The Dred Scott Heritage Foundation is dedicating the monument in his honor on Saturday at Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis.
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Alvin Brooks has served as a bridge in Kansas City for decades — as one of the city’s first Black police officers, an educator, a civil rights leader, a founder of Ad Hoc Group Against Crime, and almost a Kansas City mayor. Today he’s still on call 24/7 for whenever anyone needs help. As he asks everyone to mark their calendars for his 100th birthday in 2032, he looks back to his earliest days in Kansas City.
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Located about 10 miles north of I-70, Lexington's population is roughly the same as it was in the 1860s. The town's biggest tourist attraction is the Battle of Lexington state historic site, but community members want to draw visitors to the rest of town.
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At the turn of the 20th century, a self-taught caterer in Columbia gained national acclaim with her sought-after biscuit recipe. Fisher’s famous beaten biscuits made it onto the plates of presidents and Hollywood stars alike — making her one of the wealthiest Black women around. But her story may have been lost if not for a few determined Missouri women.
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For more than 30 years, a Monett Times reporter has held an annual vigil in the southwest Missouri town marking the night that a mob of white residents killed three Black men — Will Godley, Pete Hampton and French Godley — and forced the rest of the town's Black residents to flee for their lives.
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Quindaro in Wyandotte County was once a thriving, multiracial community, inextricably linked to the region’s history before, during and after the Civil War. This week, the ACLU of Kansas is releasing a carefully curated, more than 40-page analysis of the former township.
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With more shoreline than the coast of California, the Lake of the Ozarks in mid-central Missouri is a popular tourist destination for land-locked Midwesterners. For decades, it's provided financial opportunities for locals and outside interests alike — but at what cost? The story of how this man-made body of water came to be involves corruption, jail time, communities torn apart, and displaced families.
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In his film The League, Sam Pollard tells the story of the Negro National League, which began in Kansas City: "They brought a different kind of style ... a kind of baseball which Major League Baseball is trying to bring back."
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Call it Kansas City's cruel summer. In July 1993, the Kansas River spilled over near 59th Street and Kaw Drive in Wyandotte County, Turkey Creek flooded Southwest Boulevard, and the Missouri River came close to overtopping the levees protecting the downtown airport. Hundreds of families were displaced.
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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?
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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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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.