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Kansas the Free State

A great many people both young and old are fans of the wonderful book and movie “The Wizard of Oz”. In this story, we find out that Dorothy loved her home and living in the state of Kansas so much that in her adventure in the Land of Oz she kept telling everyone that she wanted to go back home. Another girl who loved Kansas was a real girl, not a fictional one named Laura Ingalls and she wrote about her life in the state in her book “Little House on the Prairie”. That is what the state of Kansas has – wide plains.

Today there are about 2.6 million people living in the US state of Kansas and loving it. The state has many different nicknames like the Sunflower State, Wheat State, Jayhawker State and Midway, USA. It entered the Union as the 34th state and as a free state on January 29, 1861.

It was known as the Free state because of something called the Kansas-Nebraska Act which let its residents decide for themselves if the state would allow slavery. This caused problems because settlers came from both the North and the South and each had their own opinions about slavery resulting in “Bleeding Kansas”. There were many clashes and acts of violence until 1859 when the majority made this territory free from slavery.

The U.S. brought the land which made up Kansas from France. The territory was included in the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. The first people here were Native Americans who named this state from the Sioux word Konza which meant “people of the south wind”. I find this term kind of romantic. There were Native Americans who lived in Kansas against their free will because the federal government had relocated them there.

Today people visit Kansas for the beauty of its Great Plains and rolling wheat fields. Wichita, the largest city, offers The Museum of World Treasures where visitors can explore history from dinosaurs to Elvis. The open-air Old Cowtown Museum reflects on the pioneer past of this city. In Hutchinson, you can visit the Cosmosphere which displays the Apollo 13 and Russian Vostok spacecraft.

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