Please note that the Wide-Open Town workshop will be offered virtually in Summer 2021. Although we regret that we will not be welcoming participants to Kansas City in person, we feel that the ongoing public health emergency makes a virtual format the best way to deliver this content while keeping everyone safe. We have developed a highly interactive program involving all of the original sites and look forward to two wonderful workshop sessions this summer!
Wide-Open Town: Kansas City in the Jazz Age and Great Depression is a Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshop for K-12 teachers, librarians, school system personnel, home schooling parents, and museum educators that explores historical landmarks and cultural resources in Kansas City in order to better understand the pivotal decades of the 1920s and 1930s in United States history. This twenty-year period is often described as Kansas City’s “Golden Age.” City leaders boasted of Kansas City’s economic and civic triumphs and culture flourished, yet these achievements occurred in a political, social, and economic landscape fraught with machine politics, vice, and long histories of people fighting for their rights and freedoms. Much of what played out in Kansas City is a reflection of the larger cultural and historical forces that shaped this era in US history.
The Wide-Open Town workshop will provide educators with tools to devise fresh techniques for using historical sites, architecture, museums, monuments, material culture, art, music, and historical documents to enable students to engage with the past and gain a better understanding of the forces that shaped and continue to influence national and local history.
Summer 2021 Virtual Workshop Dates: June 21-25 & July 19-23
This workshop has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this website do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.