Kansas joined the Union on January 29, 1861, the thirty-fourth state to
do so. The name derives from the Kansa Indians, the “people of the
south wind.” Kansas ranks fourteenth among the fifty states in size, and
it is located in the western northcentral United States. It is bordered by
Nebraska, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Colorado.
Plains tribes (Wichita, Pawnee, Kansa, and Osage) lived or hunted
in Kansas when the first Europeans arrived. Around 1800, the
Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Kiowa joined them. The first
European to set foot in the state was explorer Francisco Coronado
(c. 1510–1554), in 1541. France sold most of Kansas to the United
States as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.
In 1822, the Santa Fe Trail opened to wagon traffic, and for fifty
years that route was of great commercial importance to the West.
Thousands of migrants crossed northeastern Kansas in the 1840s and
1850s. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 created the Kansas Territory,
and almost immediately disputes arose as to whether Kansas would be a
free state or a slave state. Eventually, it chose to be a free state.
As railroads expanded into the West, more white settlers came to the
area and established communities. The Texas cattle drives brought great
prosperity to several Kansas towns from 1867 to 1885. This was the era
that brought fame to Wyatt Earp (1848–1929) and Wild Bill Hickok
(1837–1876).
The western region of Kansas was particularly hard-hit during the
1930s and the Great Depression (1929–41). This region was part of what was called the Dust Bowl, and residents faced ten years of drought
and deadly dust storms.
Kansas was the site of one of the most important Supreme Court
cases in American history. Race relations in the United States after the
American Civil War (1861–65) were dominated by segregation, the
separation of whites and African Americans. This policy extended to
public establishments such as restaurants, grocery stores, and even
schools. The accepted thinking was that if African Americans were kept
separate from whites but still given equal treatment, there should be no
problem. But they were not treated equally. Especially where education
was concerned; they received far less funding for facilities, textbooks, and
teachers. As a result, the quality of their education was inferior to that of
white students.
In 1951, thirteen Kansas parents filed a class-action lawsuit against
the Board of Education of the City of Topeka. Called Brown v. Board
of Education, the suit demanded that the school district reverse its policy of segregation. The battle took three years, but in 1954 the U.S.
Supreme Court declared the law of “separate but equal” segregation to be
illegal on the basis that it denied African American children equal educational opportunities. The decision was unanimous.
In the twenty-first century, Kansas’s population is 85.2 percent
white, with 5.5 percent of African American heritage, and 2 percent
Asian. Topeka is the capital city, but the state’s most populated city is
Wichita, home to more than 350,000 in 2006.
Kansas’s economy is primarily agricultural, with a focus on meatpacking and wheat production. The largest industry in the state is aircraft production. Wichita manufactures 70 percent of the world’s aviation aircraft.