Welcome to Per Aspera, a Kansas history podcast.
In season 1, to commemorate the 250th anniversary of American independence, we’re telling stories about the people and places of Kansas that connect the ideas at the heart of the Declaration of Independence. Each episode brings you a story from Kansas history that reveals what these promises have meant, how we’ve navigated the moments when these principles come into conflict, and what they continue to demand of us today.
The Per Aspera podcast is a project of the Kansas 250th Commission, made possible by generous support from America 250, Creative One, and Walmart. Original show content licensed CC BY-NC 4.0. Select third-party historical excerpts may appear under fair use or separate rights.
Before Brown: The Argentine Four and an International Fight for Equal Schools
When most people think of Kansas and school desegregation, they think of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case. But nearly thirty years earlier, a different fight played out in Kansas City's Argentine neighborhood, one that drew in the Mexican consulate, the Kansas governor, and the U.S. State Department. In the fall of 1925, four Mexican American students - Luz and Jesse Alvarado, Marcos De León, and Victorina Pérez - finished eighth grade and enrolled i...
26 May 2026
Twelve to Freedom: The Winter Escape with John Brown
In the winter of 1858–59, eleven people enslaved on Missouri farms made a dangerous choice. Facing the threat of sale, separation, and continued bondage, Jim Daniels crossed into Kansas and sought help from John Brown and his abolitionist allies. Soon, the Daniels family, the Harper family, Samuel Hamilton, and Jane Barton were traveling through Kansas in search of freedom. Their eighty-two-day journey took them from Missouri into Kansas, where they sheltered with abolitionist families, hid a...
18 May 2026
Petticoat Governments and the Pursuit of Progress
In the late 1880s, Kansas voters did something almost no other state was doing: they elected women to local office. This episode follows three of those elections - Susanna Salter's 1887 win in Argonia, where she became the first woman mayor in the United States after being nominated as a joke; Mary Lowman's 1888 win in Oskaloosa, where she led the all-women "Oskaloosa Improvement Ticket"; and Lucy Sullivan's 1889 win in Baldwin City, where her "petticoat council" won 179 votes to 39. These we...
14 Apr 2026
Rolling for Redress: Kansas and the 1979 Tractorcade
In February 1979, American farmers drove their tractors into Washington, D.C. - not as a spectacle, but as a demand. Facing falling crop prices, rising debt, and a growing wave of foreclosures, they brought the machinery of rural life to the center of political power, determined to be seen and heard. Among them were Kansas farmers, including a group from Edwards County whose experiences were later preserved through oral histories at the Kinsley Public Library. They were not seasoned protestor...
24 Mar 2026
The People's House: The Legislative War of 1893
In January 1893, a disputed election in Kansas triggered one of the most unusual constitutional crises in American history. What came to be known, only half-jokingly, as the Legislative War began with competing claims to control the Kansas House of Representatives, escalating into a standoff between rival legislatures operating under the same roof - complete with locked doors, armed guards, and dueling assertions of democratic legitimacy. Set against the backdrop of Gilded Age inequality and ...
5 Mar 2026
Before the Curtain Falls: Eisenhower’s Farewell Address
Beginning in 1959, Dwight D. Eisenhower and a small circle of advisers began shaping a speech that would become one of the most famous warnings in American political history. Delivered on January 17, 1961, his Farewell Address cautioned against the rise of a “military-industrial complex,” a phrase that has since become shorthand for the powerful relationship linking government, the military, and the defense industry. The address evolved over more than a year of drafting and revision, and Eise...
5 Mar 2026
Introducing the Per Aspera Podcast
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