Prairie Journal

Nearly thirty years before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education desegregation case, a different fight played out in Kansas City, Kansas, one that drew in the Mexican consulate, the Kansas governor, and the U.S...

Sarah Smarsh, Lucas Bessire, and Kate Benz share stories of the challenges of rural life in this month's Kansas 250 Bookshelf. They're the authors, respectively, of Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in...

The Kansas Book Festival is an annual celebration of books, readers, and writers. Director Lara Avery joins us to preview the festival, taking place in Topeka on September 26th. We also hear from two festival...

How did an inventor manage to build a subway in New York City...in secret? KPR's own Matthew Algeo tells the story in "New York's Secret Subway: The Underground Genius of Alfred Beach and the Origins of Mass Transit."

The 4th annual Paper Plains Zine Fest is coming up Labor Day weekend in Lawrence. It's three days of celebrating, exploring, and exhibiting zines and zine culture. We talk to Rachel Gibson and Grace D. Corndog, zine...

Former U.S. Senator Nancy Kassebaum Baker passed away August 21, 2026, at the age of 94. In this special rebroadcast of her 2022 talk at the Dole Institute of Politics, she reflects on her life, her career, and her...

KPR's Community Spotlight this month is on NAVO, a collective of internationally-recognized musicians and performers based in the Kansas City area.

Charley Curtis was the first Native American elected to the U.S. Congress, the Senate, and the Vice-Presidency. Deb Goodrich explores Curtis's Kansas roots and his political legacy in her Kansas Notable Award-winning...

Dirty politics, partisan division, contested elections, fake news -- none of it is new. Greg Jackson is the author of "Been There, Done That: How Our History Shows What We Can Overcome" and the host of the "History That...

We visit with best-selling author Laura Moriarty about her just-released novel, Sunshine Finds You . Also, Robert Rebein's The Last Rancher has been named to the Library of Congress' "Great Reads from Great Places" for...

What better way to celebrate America 250 than with food? This month's Kansas 250 Bookshelf features Teatime to Tailgates: 150 Years at the K-State Table and Amy Barickman's Vintage Notions.

Kansas voters head to the polls August 4th in the primary. Who's running and what's on the ballot? Washburn University's Bob Beatty joins us to talk about the constitutional amendment on electing Kansas Supreme Court...

From Kentucky to Kansas to New York City in the Gilded Age, journalist-reformer and self-proclaimed "Queen of Bohemia" Zoe Anderson Norris chronicled the lives of immigrants and the poor in her self-published magazine...

The story of the fight to save a Kansas City, Kansas, cemetery, and the Wyandotte woman who became the first Native American woman to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court. We visit with the editors of "Lyda Conley and...

Three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, historian, and author Rick Atkinson gives the 2026 Dole Lecture at the University of Kansas. His latest book, The Fate of the Day , is the second in his Revolutionary War...