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Finding the Leavenworth Constitution
In 1877, Charles S. Gleed was a young man in his early twenties living in Lawrence, Kansas. He was a student at the University of Kansas and an employee of various newspapers. In January of that year...
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Kaw Valley Flood film
Silent film footage of the 1951 flood of the Kansas River basin in Topeka is now available on Kansas Memory. With 28 deaths and over $1 billion in damages, the '51 flood was one of the most...
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Cowboy Band
Hear the phrase “cowboy band” and you might think of singing cowboys like Gene Autry or maybe a western string band beating out jigs and reels on fiddles and guitars for a country dance. But in Dodge...
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Kansas State Federation of Labor
One hundred and twenty-one years ago this month, in July of 1890, a small group of Kansas trade union leaders adopted a constitution for a new, centralized state labor organization. With the decline...
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Strike!
In 1919, A. M. Fury managed the Robinson Grain Company in Palco, a small town in northwest Kansas. On December 18, he wrote Kansas governor Henry Allen of Topeka to say that his threshing operation...
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County Browsing
No matter where you live in Kansas, from the High Plains to the Ozark Plateau, from the Flint Hills to the Arkansas River lowlands, Kansas Memory hosts unique historic photos and documents on your...
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Blind Tigers
In 1908, the Wyandotte [Kansas] city court arrested and convicted the state’s Assistant Attorney General C. W. Trickett for unlawfully receiving fees in exchange for services. Many believed Kansas...
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Iron Shirt
In 2007, a small photo (a carte-de-visite) of a Cheyenne chief named Iron Shirt was donated to the Kansas Historical Society as part of a collection of photos and documents belonging to Colonel John...
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Frontier Doctor
In mid-December, 1905, a Professor E. H. S. Bailey of Lawrence, Kansas, received an express shipment from Topeka. The bundle contained two bottles of vanilla extract, multiple packages of ham sausage,...
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Letters of hardship and difficulty
One of the great things about a digital repository like Kansas Memory is that it gives us the opportunity to feature materials that might not be noticed otherwise. A letter written by a poor farmer...
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The Weapon
In 1912, Effie Frost was living in Verdi, Kansas, a rural village in southeast Ottawa County. Her home was in Junction City but she stayed in Verdi as a missionary to local residents who favored pool...
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Samuel Reader's lantern slides
Samuel J. Reader arrived in Indianola, Shawnee County, Kansas in 1855. As an adult, his occupation was farming but he was a man of many talents and interesting hobbies. He was an avid diarist, drawer...
View ArticleHistorical Society partnership with Ancestry
The Kansas Historical Society has partnered with Ancestry.com to make thousands of pages of records available for free to Kansans with a valid driver’s license. While Ancestry’s primary interest is...
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The Prairie Woodcutter
Herschel C. Logan (1901-1987) was a woodcut artist and printmaker raised in Winfield, Kansas. His depictions of the Kansas landscape, including the Flint Hills, dust storms, tornadoes, and farmhouses...
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William Clark (of Lewis & Clark)
Sometime between 1883 and 1885, John Speer, a former director of the Kansas Historical Society, happened upon a pile of leather-bound volumes outside a used bookstore in Lawrence. Immediately upon his...
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Riding bicycles
In the spirit of Biking Across Kansas, we're celebrating bicycles and the places they've taken us across the state. Bicycles have been used to deliver newspapers, carry home the bounty of a hunting...
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Kansas State Penitentiary
The Kansas State Penitentiary, now known as the Lansing Correctional Facility, was built in the 1860s. Since then, thousands of inmates have passed through it's doors, most notably, Perry Smith and...
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250,000 images!
Congratulations are in order to the visitors, volunteers, and staff who support and work to improve digital access to the collections of the Kansas Historical Society. We now have over 250,000 digital...
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Voting ballots
With the November 6th election just around the corner, you're likely to see electronic ballots widely used at polling locations. While paper ballots are still used, they do not resemble the scratch...
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Veterans of WWII Oral History Project
In 2005, the Kansas Legislature awarded the Kansas Historical Society $150,000 to issue grants to nonprofit groups charged with collecting oral histories from WWII veterans. Each grant awardee focused...
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