Kansas History - Spring 2025
Spring 2025
(Volume 48, Number 1)
“Rural Depopulation and Reduced-Player High School Football in Kansas”
by Andrew Husa
Continued rural depopulation throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has made reduced-player high school football a mainstay in Kansas. The adoption of six-man football in 1935 and eight-man football in 1956 as an alternative for smaller high schools (those without enough athletes to play the traditional eleven-man game) has helped them keep teams on the field despite low enrollments. This article tracks rural depopulation and school consolidation trends in the early twentieth century and the rapid rise in the number of high schools across Kansas who adopted the reduced-player version of the game to give their young men an opportunity to play football; by the 1950s, Kansas was among the leading states in number of high schools playing six-man football. With this version’s adoption reflecting school enrollment sizes, and enrollments reflecting populations, the historical geography of six- and eight-man high school football in Kansas mirrors demographic trends across space and time.
“Mexican Excellence: An Oral History of Cipriana Rodriguez’s Immigrant Experience in Southwest Kansas”
edited and introduced by Kate Cruz, David Solis, and Marco A. Macias
In the early 1980s, Robert Oppenheimer, a former professor of Latin American History at the University of Kansas, collected a series of oral history interviews, which are stored at the Kansas Historical Society in Topeka. Cipriana Rodriguez’s oral history, conducted in 1981, is the second interview of our series. She was born in 1914, five years after her parents came to the United States and permanently settled in Garden City. Her compelling oral history speaks to the resilience and struggles of the Rodriguez family, who navigated persistent discrimination, demanding and dangerous labor in the sugar beet fields and railroads, and the natural disaster that came with the Arkansas River flood of 1965. This recount of their experiences provides a unique perspective highlighting the role of social bonds, mutual aid, and cultural preservation in an unfamiliar environment, southwest Kansas. Students in Marco A. Macias’s Chicanos: A History of Mexican Americans course contributed to the annotation of this interview during the fall of 2024.
“Contextualizing the Monroe Neighborhood Using Archaeological Methods at Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park”
by Nikki Klarmann, Laura Murphy, and Victoria Shaw
In June 2022, the Kansas Archeology Training Program (KATP) field school took place at the Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park in partnership with the Kansas Historical Society, Kansas Anthropological Association, the National Park Service’s Midwest Archeological Center, and Washburn University. The Park, located in Topeka, Kansas, consists of the Monroe Elementary School, which serves as a broader symbol of desegregation because of its role in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. Through historical maps, archival documents, and archaeological excavations, archaeologists sought to understand the historical use of the property. During the field school, they targeted several areas for archaeological excavation directly to the north and south of the school building constructed in 1926 that now serves as the Park's visitor center. This building replaced the first Monroe School for African American children, which was constructed in 1874 and demolished in 1927. Participants excavated potential areas for original outbuildings associated with the first Monroe school and other areas of previous residences along Monroe Street. As this report demonstrates, participants have identified three structures and documented artifacts associated with the people who once lived and learned here, providing additional historical context that reaches beyond the Brown v. Board decision.
In Memoriam
Book Reviews
Book Notes
