The Wide-Open Town workshop was offered virtually in Summer 2021. We hope to host the workshop in person in the future.
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devise fresh techniques for using historical sites, architecture, museums, monuments, material culture, art, music, and historical documents to enable students to engage with the past and gain a better understanding of the forces that shaped and continue to influence national and local history.
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.