A black and white photo of students in a classroom

“I, Too, Have a Voice”: Authentic Stories from the Brown v. Board Experience in Topeka, Kansas

Marietta Patterson

Dr. Beryl New, Ed.D.

Topeka has a wealth of citizens who can recall the impact of the Brown v. Board decision on their lives and within the Topeka community before and after the historic decision.

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A tent with a tarp over it with a sign in front with stylized text reading "Wake up Grateful"

“Unsettled Lawrence”: Challenging Collective Memory of Settlement Through the Oral and Public Histories of Unhoused Populations in Lawrence

Rachel Schwaller

Multi-Term Lecturer University of Kansas

We often tell the history of Lawrence, Kansas from the perspective of settlement in the “great American desert.” Even moments of dis-settlement, such as Quantrill’s Raid, are couched as victorious resettlement. Such a narrative elevates settling (often by white “homesteaders”) while stigmatizing other forms of occupancy as non-settlement.

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American Indian Digital History Project

Jason Heppler

Research Director, American Indian Digital History Project; Senior Web Developer, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University George Mason University

Kent Blansett

Langston Hughes Associate Professor of Indigenous Studies and History, University of Kansas, and Co-Principal Investigator, Stories for All University of Kansas

Founded in 2010, the American Indian Digital History Project works with Tribal archives, community members, organizations, and colleges to recover, preserve, and increase free & open searchable access to rare Indigenous newspapers, photographs, and archival materials throughout Native North America. It promotes accurate and responsible research and reporting that focuses on Indigenous nations, communities, and peoples.

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Bench by the Road Stories: The Stories of the Bench by the Road Project

Carolyn Denard

Founder and Board Chair, The Toni Morrison Society The Toni Morrison Society

Craig Stutman

Associate Professor of History and Public Policy, Delaware Valley University Delaware Valley University

The Toni Morrison Society’s Bench by the Road Project has placed benches and accompanying plaques at 32 sites around the world memorializing people and events from African American and African diasporic history. The Society plans to create a digital archive documenting the histories of each of these sites, including audio and video recordings with individuals in the communities where each Bench was placed.

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a group of people of BLACKLawrence Project

BLINK!

Cia Cole

B.L.A.C.K. Lawrence

This documentary storytelling project shows how classical music in urban communities inspires intuitive movement and value. It describes how classical music creates instantaneously powerful movements and leaders through interdisciplinary dialogue around the arts, history and sciences. Interviews and storytelling will illustrate the influence of classical music and fine arts upon past, present and modern movements.

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Building Black Kansas City

Carmaletta Williams

Executive Director, Black Archives of Mid-America Black Archives of Mid-America

Building Black Kansas City is an oral history project focusing on the African American experience in Kansas City, MO in the mid twentieth century, beginning at the end of World War II. These stories will chronicle the building of Black Kansas City through varying aspects of its culture, collecting and making accessible the voices of individuals who might not otherwise have an opportunity to share their personal stories from a bygone era.

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Coming to the Heartland

Marta Caminero-Santangelo

Professor of English, University of Kansas University of Kansas

Elizabeth MacGonagle

Associate Professor of History and of African and African American Studies, University of Kansas University of Kansas

Focusing on the diversity, adversity, and struggles of Latin American and African immigrants in the Heartland, this initiative asks how the new digital age affects the stories that immigrants tell, as well as the possibilities for their visibility in the wider community.

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From Disability Rights to Disability Justice in Kansas: Reflecting on the First Fifty Years, Anticipating Better Futures

Ray Mizumura-Pence

Associate Teaching Professor, Department of American Studies University of Kansas

The project chronicles the pursuit of disability rights and justice in Kansas as an ongoing struggle. Some fifty years ago, a disability rights movement emerged in the United States along with passage of federal laws mandating accessibility and forbidding discrimination. This movement has expanded, diversified, and responded to myriad challenges.

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GeoTestimonios Transfronterizxs

Sylvia Fernández

(Until December 2021) Public and Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hall Center for the Humanities, University of Kansas, and Co-Principal Investigator, Stories for All / (From January 2022) Assistant Professor, Digital Technology and Culture, University of Kansas

Gris Muñoz

Independent writer / Escritora independiente

GeoTestimonios is a living border-community storytelling project that reappropriates personal experiences through testimonies and literary narratives about life in the El Paso-Juárez border region. This work is a collaboration between border poet and author Gris Muñoz and academic and digital humanist Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla.

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Heartland Makers Collective: Digitizing the Wak’o Mujeres Phu Nu Womxn Mural Project: Stories of Kansas Women of Color

Imani Wadud

Heartland Makers Collective Community Project Facilitator and Program Coordinator Heartland Makers Collective

The Wak'o Mujeres Phu Nu Womxn Mural Project: Stories of Kansas Women of Color, nearly eight feet tall and half a city block in length, is a project for women of color, by women of color, to empower women of color. The mural was based on over twenty oral histories conducted by the Women of Color Makers Collective. These oral histories will now be transcribed, digitized, and shared with the public in the form of podcasts and an online digital…

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people in meeting with coffee over table.

Invested Stayers: Portraits of Teachers who Thrive in Challenging Times

Heidi L. Hallman

Professor of Curriculum and Teaching University of Kansas

Terri L. Rodriguez

Professor of Education College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University

Kristen Pastore-Capuana

Assistant Professor of English Buffalo State College

“Invested Stayers: Portraits of Teachers who Thrive in Challenging Times” features stories of K-12 teachers in U.S. schools who we call invested stayers, or those who have persisted and thrived in the teaching profession.

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A collage of images associated with the project, "ansas City’s Culturally Diverse Communities and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: Oral Histories"

Kansas City’s Culturally Diverse Communities and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: Oral Histories

Tara Laver

Senior Archivist Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

This project will result in 25 oral history interviews documenting the historical lived experiences and perceptions of the museum among multiple Kansas City communities. This work is especially relevant and timely as the museum begins to think about how it will celebrate its centennial in 2033, a time that will bring greater focus on and interest in the institution’s history.

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Police Brutality Song

Alex Kimball Williams

Co-founder B.L.A.C.K. Lawrence

Tai Amri Spann-Ryan

Co-founder B.L.A.C.K. Lawrence

Cia Cole

B.L.A.C.K. Lawrence

This music video will tell regional stories of police brutality. The song describes the beautiful life and dreams of a young Black man whose life is taken too soon by police in his neighborhood. It speaks to the resilience, fear, and loss deeply felt by Black people each time a new hashtag is birthed. The content is gentle and sensitive, so that audiences of various ages (3rd grade and up) have enjoyed and understood it.

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Preserving the History and Contributions of Interprofessional Practice and Education

Teri Kennedy

Ida Johnson Feaster Professor of Interprofessional Practice, Education, Policy, and Research, and Associate Dean, Office of Interprofessional Practice, Education, Policy, and Research, School of Nursing University of Kansas

IPE@KUMC/KU preserves the history and continuing contributions to interprofessional practice and education (IPE) by The University of Kansas Medical Center (KUMC) and The University of Kansas (KU) through a podcast series, oral histories, and archival documents to be preserved in collaboration with the Clendening History of Medicine Library and KUMC Archives. IPE is ultimately about social justice.

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Queer Voices

Courtney Farr

Chair of Community Engagement Lawrence PRIDE

Shania Lopez-Cabrera

Finance Chair Lawrence PRIDE

Queer Voices gathers local LGBTQ+ members together for evenings of story telling from our community. Speakers share true stories from their lives that run the gamut from historic protests, bad first dates, to the dangers and joys of existing in Kansas as a queer person. With the support of Stories for All, participants will be able to opt in to having their stories recorded to be added to an archive of queer experiences in this area.

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Reclaiming Home: Remembering the Topeka Bottoms

María Velasco

Professor, Visual Art University of Kansas

Valerie Mendoza

Independent Public Historian Washburn University

Matt Jacobson

Professor, Film and Media Studies University of Kansas

Donna Rae Pearson

Local Historian, Kitchen Table History Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library

“Reclaiming Home” will tell the story of Topeka’s Bottoms neighborhood through oral history, a documentary and art. In the 1950s and ’60s, more than 3,000 Topekans were forced to leave their homes and businesses in the Bottoms district in downtown to make way for new real estate development as part of the Urban Renewal Project.

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Stories of African-American Life in Lawrence

Ursula Minor

President Lawrence NAACP

Lois Orth-Lopes

Assistant Secretary Lawrence NAACP

Sara Minor

Secretary Lawrence NAACP

This project will collect stories from local black families about the racial history of Lawrence, KS. In recent years, the local NAACP chapter has worked with the city and the Equal Justice Initiative to bring high-profile moments of local racism to light. But for every moment of high-profile racism, there are dozens of untold stories of the black experience.

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Survivors Speak: Centering Survivor Autonomy in Digital Storytelling

Stephanie Krehbiel

Executive Director and Co-Founder Into Account

Jay Yoder

Director of Operations and Co-Founder Into Account

Erin Bergen

Director of Student Advocacy Into Account

Sexualized violence survivors are often considered socially suspect voices in the accounting of their own experiences, and given undersized roles in shaping the narrative that makes sense of what justice looks like after acts of sexualized violence. In a reflection of existing social inequities, a survivor’s account of their own experience is only as authoritative as their social power, and the social power of those who believe them, allow/s.

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few things on table with lights in surroundings.

Tell Me a Story

Erin Raux

Museum Director Mid-America All-Indian Museum

April Scott

Executive Director Mid-America All-Indian Museum

Michelle Conine

Education Coordinator Mid-America All-Indian Museum

We are a museum dedicated to educating people about and preserving the heritage of the American Indian for future generations. As part of our mission, we have created our TELL ME A STORY studio. In Native culture, stories are told to educate children about cultural morals and values. When someone ceases to tell a story, part of the cultural knowledge is gone.

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The Boston Reproductive Justice Audiowalk

Katie Batza

Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies University of Kansas

This Audiowalk is a work of historical scholarship, a call to arms, and a motivational tool for continued efforts toward reproductive justice. It traces the struggles of reproductive justice onto the Boston landscape while simultaneously expanding definitions of reproductive justice.

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poster colored and few people are painted over it.

The Chicano Movement in Kansas

Valerie Mendoza

Independent Public Historian Washburn University

This project consists of oral histories of Kansas Chicano Movement leaders from the 1970s.These activists drew inspiration from the national Chicano Movement and their initiatives impacted the Kansas Latinx population in ways that reverberate to this day in the areas of civil rights, educational opportunities and voting power.

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The Jurisprudence and Child Privacy Praxis of Black and Native-American Home Education

The tradition of Black home education dates back to 1787, when Prince Hall petitioned the Massachusetts Legislature for a “Free Africa” school for the children of free Black families. Although Massachusetts was the first state to recognize a universal right of education and the state did not require segregation, the damaging and discriminatory treatment Black children experienced, compelled Black parents to seek separate schools.

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Trading Fours: An Oral Exchange on Jazz Musical Influence and Biography

Rashida Phillips

Executive Director American Jazz Museum

James McGee

Senior Manager of Visitor and Virtual Experience American Jazz Museum

The American Jazz Museum’s permanent exhibition features four prominent icons, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker. Each of these icons center jazz as an American experience born of creativity, innovation, and black culture.

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Under the Rainbow: Oral Histories of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (GLBTQ) People in Kansas

Tami Albin

Associate Librarian, Center for Faculty/Staff Initiatives and Engagement University of Kansas

Over the last 10-15 years there has been a noticeable increase in interest in the field of queer rural studies to correct for previous assumptions that queer history was always urban and usually on the coast. Yet, even within the scholarship that has been produced, Kansas is frequently overlooked as a site where GLBTQ people exist and have lived for a very long time.

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Voices of Dementia

Amy Berkley

Independent Storyteller Independent Storytellers

Of the sixty million Americans providing care to a family member, two thirds are women providing care to aging mothers. These stories explore the unique relationships between aging mothers and their adult daughters, and how those relationships change with the onset of dementia. These stories and analyses will be collected into an online archive accessible to families undergoing similar experiences.

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A church with a sign in front that says "This house is not for sale! All are welcome"

Voices of the Displaced

Nishani Frazier

Co-Principal Investigator, Stories for All and Associate Professor of History and American Studies University of Kansas

Amanda Lawson

Assistant Director of Research for the L.I.F.E. Research Lab Miami University

Gentrification, the calculated reclamation of black urban spaces for financially affluent new homeowners, is spreading through black communities across America. After years of economic oppression and deprivation, the black community now stands at the edge of perhaps the greatest community dispersal in its history.

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Wichita Nonwhite Business Owners tell Their Stories

Jay Price

Professor of History and Director of the Local and Community History Program Wichita State University

Sue Abdinnour

Omer Distinguished Professor in Business Wichita State University

Robert Weems

Willard W. Garvey Distinguished Professor of Business History Wichita State University

Nonwhite entrepreneurs rarely appear in broad-based histories or surveys of American enterprise. Existing studies of ethnic/nonwhite businesses focus upon commercial operations; this project gives priority to illuminating the motivations of nonwhite individuals to become entrepreneurs.

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