Kansas City is asking voters to buy into its public school system for the first time in nearly 60 years. Even after Kansas City Public Schools regained accreditation and turned the tide of student performance, crumbling buildings offer a persistent reminder of the city's disinvestment. It's a relationship strained by decades of racism, a history-making desegregation case and plenty of internal turmoil.

As Kansas City celebrates the Chiefs’ third consecutive Super Bowl appearance, the team name, logo, and some problematic fan customs like the “tomahawk chop” are once again being broadcast worldwide. But where did it all start, and how did the team avoid becoming the Kansas City Texans?

Popcorn and movie theaters are inseparable today. But a century ago, cinemas actually banned the beloved treat for being cheap and messy. A Kansas City saleswoman named Julia Braden became one of the first popcorn vendors to talk her way inside the lobby — and built a concession empire in the middle of the Great Depression.

Nora Holt was the first Black person in the United States to earn a master’s degree in music. A prolific composer and a club-hopping socialite, she once wrote a 42-page work for a 100-piece orchestra. But you’ve probably never heard any of it. Scholars have dreamt of finding her stolen manuscripts for nearly a century.

Despite her success in the 1930s, Dana Suesse’s music remains underappreciated. From piano concertos infused with jazz to popular film music, Suesse was a woman of great musical prowess.

Armada con una grabadora, la bibliotecaria de Kansas City, Irene Ruiz, capturó la evolución de la historia del vecindario de Westside e hizo de la biblioteca un lugar más acogedor para los inmigrantes mexicanos y latinos que vivían allí. Hoy en día, la sucursal del vecindario de Westside la Biblioteca Pública de Kansas City, que cuenta con la sólida colección de idioma español que Ruiz comenzó, lleva su nombre en su honor.

Armed with a tape recorder, Kansas City librarian Irene Ruiz captured the evolving history of the Westside and made the library a more welcoming place for the Mexican immigrants and Latinos who lived there. Today, the Westside branch of the Kansas City Public Library — featuring the robust Spanish language collection that Ruiz began — is named in her honor.

The American dance craze known as 'the cakewalk' began as a form of resistance by enslaved Black people — a showy promenade that concealed a mockery of slave owners. Now, modern devotees are marking the life of its most charismatic and famous champion, Kansas City’s own Doc Brown.

Thousands of people took over the small town of Sedalia, Missouri, in 1974 for the Ozark Music Festival, a party full of nudity, drugs and rock 'n roll music. People still talk about the lore from that hot wild weekend. Depending on what side of the festival fence you were on, it was three days of heaven — or three days of hell.

The landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that outlawed racial segregation in public schools may have played out differently if it hadn’t been for a tenacious group of women in Johnson County, Kansas, who led their own integration lawsuit five years earlier. The case centered around a two-room schoolhouse and included a lengthy boycott, big-shot NAACP lawyers, FBI surveillance — and six very brave children.

Once seen as a musical relic, audio cassettes have survived the eras of CDs and streaming to win over music lovers of a new generation. That’s in large part thanks to the National Audio Company in Springfield, Missouri, the largest cassette manufacturer in the world.

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?