Local History

UPDATED Question: What happened to all the Christmas decorations that used to be downtown, particularly the crowns strung across the streets with garland? In our first response to this question, I reported that the Merchants Association began displaying crowns at busy downtown intersections in 19...

Question: What happened to all the Christmas decorations that used to be downtown, particularly the crowns strung across the streets with garland? A timely question as we enter holiday light season in the Kansas City area. Short of digging through the attic at City Hall, my first thought was to cons...

The KCTV broadcast tower at 31st Street and Grand Avenue once served as a 1,042-foot tall beacon at night, visible for miles around with more than 1,300 white lights tracing its four legs. But the tower has been unlit for more than a decade. Kansas City native Todd Hembree wonders why — and if — the lights will ev...

The Library is currently migrating its large collection of digital historic images to a new software platform. An unfortunate consequence of our data migration is that we need to take the entire collection offline for about two months while the work is completed.

It sure seems like Kansas City ought to be named Missouri City, doesn’t it? Although, our neighbors to the north in Clay County where the actual Missouri City is located might have something to say about that. To better understand why Kansas City was given its name, we must first gain an understanding of why a city was...

What do you want to know about our community? Beginning October 3, the Library and The Kansas City Star are combining resources to find answers to questions about regional topics ranging from the history of barbecue to the stories behind local landmarks. In a new partnership called What’s Your...

Lucile Bluford – namesake of the Library's L.H. Bluford Branch – was a local civil rights leader and helped make The Kansas City Call one of the most important African-American newspapers in the nation. During July, The Library celebrates Bluford’s impact on t...

Kansas has seen advances in LGBT acceptance and rights over the past decade and a half that belies perceptions of one of the country’s most famously red states. Progress has come fitfully, to be sur...

In celebration of Women’s History Month, the Library showcases several remarkable women who have left their mark on the Kansas City region in Coloring Kansas City: Women Who Made History, a special, limited-edition coloring book curated by the Missouri Valley Special Collect...

The Library recently launched its newest historical website, The Pendergast Years: Kansas City in the Jazz Age & Great Depression, a digital trove of photos, letters, documents, and original...