Kansas City was founded as a Missouri river outpost in 1838, but the birth of the city we know today came eighty years later, in 1920. The dawn of federal Prohibition supercharged the influence of corrupt political boss Tom Pendergast, who made Kansas City into a “wide-open town” infamously known as the “Paris of the Plains” for its free-flowing liquor, abundance of vice and enviable jazz scene. While the rest of the country chafed under Prohibition, KC gave safe harbor to the fringe of American culture, from socialist agitators to iconic fashionistas to adventurous filmmakers. A hundred years later, we look back at the most important era in our city’s history.
KC was once home to the country’s top fashion label
The of story of Jay McShann, Charlie Parker and the birth of the KC jazz era
PLAYLIST: The top ten songs from KC in the twenties
Small-town Kansas was once home to the nation’s most controversial publishing house
Local roots of the women’s suffrage movement
How America’s modern political parties first took shape in KC
Two pioneering documentary filmmakers came from Kansas
Eight newspapers that Kansas Citians read in the 1920s
How the Kansas City Monarchs became the city’s favorite sports team in the 1920s
You can still get a drink at these notorious Prohibition-era Kansas City speakeasies
