Per Aspera: A Kansas History Podcast

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 jo...

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 Ti...

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...

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 du...

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 t...