History of Kansas CityHistory & audio guide · Kansas City

Many people only know Kansas City in passing, on the way somewhere else. This special tells you why it's worth stopping. Long before the jazz and the bridges over the Missouri, this was pure frontier: grasslands, Indigenous routes, the edge of what the country knew of itself. Kansas City was born from the river and, when the trains arrived, it exploded: a railroad hub, stockyards, immigrants, a waypoint between the industrial East and the still-untamed West.

But it was also frontier in the worst sense: during the Civil War, this region became one of the most violent in the country, with guerrillas, fires and revenge. Decades later came its golden, stranger age: Prohibition that nobody respected, clubs that never closed and a jazz of its own, improvised, the jazz of Count Basie and Charlie Parker.

And when the trains and the stockyards fell, the city reinvented itself again. Five chapters to understand a city that always changed without ever stopping, and that ended up shaping the country's music, sports and memory. Walk it while Ruthy tells you the story, standing right there, in no hurry.