bojojoti | Happy Birthday, Kansas! (Reply)

Kansas celebrates her 150th birthday today. She's a young state but has a rich history. Our motto (on our state seal above), Ad Astra per Aspera, is "To the stars through difficulties," and she certainly has had her share of difficulties but never stopped reaching for the stars.

"The high plains at first gave him an overpowering impression of emptiness. Never before had he beheld such a sky--the cosmic vault of blue appeared to occupy a good three fourths of the world, making small and unimportant the scattered farm houses with their meager clumps of ragged trees and inevitable windmills.

But though the vastness at first oppressed him, eventually it distilled in him a sensation of fetterless freedom which he grew to love almost jubilantly." - Paul I. Wellman, The Walls of Jericho

"...Kansas glories in her days to be,
In her horizons limitless and vast...
She has no ruins gray that men revere--
Her time is 'Now,' Her Heritage is 'Here.'"
-Harry Kemp, KANSAS

"Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow. It's what sunflowers do." - Helen Keller
(The sunflower is our state flower.)

"...no genuine Kansan can emigrate. He may wander. He may roam. He may travel. He may go elsewhere, but no other State can ever claim him as a citizen. Once naturalized, the allegiance can never be forswarn." - John J. Ingalls, The Kansas Magazine