50 free Kansas trivia questions with answers. These Kansas trivia questions cover the whole Sunflower State, not just the Kansas City suburbs. You will start with the basics: the capital, the motto, the meadowlark and the cottonwood, the year Kansas became the 34th state. Then the questions head into the territory years, from the Kansas-Nebraska Act and Bleeding Kansas to Quantrill's raid on Lawrence, before running west along the cattle trails to Abilene, Ellsworth and Dodge City. There is plenty of twentieth-century Kansas too: Brown v. Board of Education in Topeka, Eisenhower's boyhood home, Amelia Earhart's Atchison, the aircraft plants that made Wichita the Air Capital, and the two Wichita start-ups that became Pizza Hut and White Castle. Sports fans get Naismith, the Jayhawks and Bill Snyder's Wildcats; road-trippers get Mount Sunflower, the geographic center of the lower 48, Big Brutus, the Cosmosphere and a salt mine 650 feet down. About a third are easy enough for a classroom on Kansas Day, a third are medium, and the rest will test people who grew up here. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and official Kansas sources, and each question shows the sentence that confirms it once you have answered.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which city is the capital of Kansas?
Topeka
Wichita is the most populous city, but the seat of government has sat on the Kansas River since statehood in 1861.
Q 02What is Kansas's official nickname?
Sunflower State
The state flower is the wild native sunflower, and the same bloom shares the reverse of the 2005 Kansas quarter with a bison.
Q 03In which year was Kansas admitted to the Union as the 34th state?
1861
Statehood came on January 29, weeks after Southern legislators began walking out of Congress, which cleared the way for entry as a free state.
Q 04The violent 1850s struggle over whether the territory would allow slavery is remembered by what name?
Bleeding Kansas
At least 56 political killings were documented in the territory between 1854 and 1859, a rehearsal for the Civil War that followed.
Q 05Which 1854 law by Stephen Douglas organized two new territories and let settlers vote on slavery?
Kansas-Nebraska Act
Stephen Douglas drafted it mainly to clear a path for a transcontinental railroad; the popular-sovereignty clause repealed the Missouri Compromise and lit the fuse.
Q 06Which Kansas town was burned in the August 1863 raid led by Confederate guerrilla William Quantrill?
Lawrence
Around 150 men and boys were killed; the town had been a Jayhawker headquarters and an anti-slavery stronghold since its founding by New Englanders.
Q 07The 1954 Supreme Court case striking down school segregation was against which Kansas city's school board?
Topeka
Oliver Brown's daughter had been refused a spot at the school nearest her home; the unanimous ruling partially overturned Plessy v. Ferguson.
Q 08Which Kansas town did President Dwight D. Eisenhower consider his hometown?
Abilene
His family moved there in 1892; his presidential library and grave are there today, and a funeral train carried his body home in 1969.
Q 09Aviator Amelia Earhart was born in 1897 in which Kansas river town?
Atchison
She was born in her grandfather's house; he was a former judge and president of the local savings bank.
Q 10What is the highest natural point in Kansas?
Mount Sunflower
At 4,039 feet it sits half a mile from the Colorado line on a private ranch, complete with a plaque reading "On this site in 1897, nothing happened."
Q 11The geographic center of the 48 contiguous states lies near which small Kansas town?
Lebanon
A 1918 survey fixed the point in Smith County; a proxy marker was put up in 1940 to keep visitors off the private land where the true point falls.
Q 12The Flint Hills of eastern Kansas are famous for holding the densest remaining stretch of what ecosystem?
Tallgrass prairie
Settlers could not plow the rocky, chert-strewn soil, so the hills went to cattle instead of crops and were never turned over.
Q 13Which explorer coined the name "Flint Hills" in his 1806 journal?
Zebulon Pike
His entry read "passed very ruff flint hills"; the flint is chert weathering out of the Permian limestone underneath.
Q 21Who first proposed making the tiger salamander the Kansas state amphibian in 1993?
A second-grade class
Two pupils at O-K Elementary in Wichita pitched the idea to their teacher and the class petitioned the governor; Colorado adopted the same salamander in 2012.
Q 22Roughly what share of all winter wheat grown in the United States comes from Kansas?
40%
About 95% of the state's crop is hard red winter wheat, a variety brought over by German-Russian Mennonite settlers in the 1870s.
Q 23Which immigrant group is credited with bringing hard winter wheat to Kansas in the 19th century?
German-Russian Mennonites
Q 14Which Kansas town, the 'Queen of the Cowtowns', employed lawmen Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson?
Dodge City
At its 19th-century peak the town shipped up to 500,000 Texas cattle a year; the radio and TV western Gunsmoke was set there.
Q 15In 1866 a Texas steer was worth about $4. What did it fetch in the North and East, spurring the Chisholm Trail?
$40
The Civil War had cut Texas off from its markets and left it awash in longhorns; Joseph McCoy's new stockyards at the Kansas Pacific railhead opened the next year to cash in.
Q 16What is the Kansas state motto?
Ad astra per aspera
It means "To the stars through difficulties"; a bronze Kansa archer aiming at the North Star, titled Ad Astra, has topped the Capitol dome since 2002.
Q 17Which bird is the state bird of Kansas?
Western meadowlark
Five other states share it, making it second only to the cardinal as America's most-adopted state bird.
Q 18Which tree did Kansas name its state tree in 1937, calling it "the pioneer of the prairie"?
Cottonwood
Wyoming and Nebraska later adopted the same tree; Custer's cavalry fed its bark to their horses during the winter of 1868-69.
Q 19The Kansas state song is which American classic, written as a poem by a Smith County homesteader?
Home on the Range
Brewster Higley wrote it in the early 1870s as "My Western Home"; the state adopted it in 1947 and KU's band plays it after every home game.
Q 20Which reptile is the state reptile of Kansas?
Ornate box turtle
It is one of only two land turtles native to the Great Plains, and Nebraska picked the same one.
Miller Bernhard Warkentin imported seed from Ukraine to feed demand, and USDA crop explorer Mark Carleton went to Russia hunting for more varieties.
Q 24Which Kansas town's Plaza Cinema (1907) is listed by Guinness as the world's oldest operating cinema?
Ottawa
Kansas also had one of the first stand-alone film theaters west of the Mississippi, the Patee, which had to build its own generating plant in 1903 because its town was not yet electrified.
Q 25Cessna, Beechcraft and Hawker were merged under which Wichita-based company in 2014?
Textron Aviation
Boeing, by contrast, ended decades of Kansas manufacturing between 2012 and 2013.
Q 26Which restaurant chain was founded in Wichita in 1958 by two brothers with a $600 loan from their mother?
Pizza Hut
Dan and Frank Carney chose the name because their sign only had room for eight letters.
Q 27Which chain, credited as the world's first fast-food burger chain, was founded in Wichita in 1921?
White Castle
Cook Walt Anderson and insurance man Billy Ingram started with $700; sliders sold for five cents.
Q 28The inventor of basketball founded the University of Kansas program in 1898. Who was he?
James Naismith
He was hired as a chapel director and physical-education instructor, and finished 55-60, the only losing record among Kansas coaches.
Q 29How many NCAA tournament championships had Kansas men's basketball won through 2022?
Four
The titles came in 1952, 1988, 2008 and 2022; the Helms Foundation retroactively added 1922 and 1923 to make six overall.
Q 30Which university's teams are the Wildcats, wearing Royal Purple?
Kansas State
Their annual meetings with the Jayhawks are the Sunflower Showdown, and the basketball edition is sometimes scheduled around Kansas Day.