About Per Aspera
To the Stars Through Difficulty
Exploring Kansas's complex history through immersive audio storytelling.
Our Team
Kara Heitz
Kara is a historian, educator, and storyteller. She runs a media production company that creates historically-focused podcasts and documentary films, including the award-winning film “A New Deal for Public Art in the Free State,” and the multi-award-winning Humanities Kansas podcast “Kansas 1972”. She is also a historical consultant, specializing in the New Deal era and Midwest regional history. And she teaches history and film at the Kansas City Art Institute. You can find out more about her work at: https://karaheitz.org/
Producer, Director, Researcher, and Host
Jay Price
Jay M. Price is a Professor of History at Wichita State University, where he also directs the Local and Community History Program. With a focus on local and community history, his current works include a biography of Kansas Governor and Archivist of the United States John Carlin, a photo history of the Wichita LGBTQ community, explorations of entrepreneurship in Wichita and a number of architectural history projects. He currently serves on the Kansas Historic Sites Board of Review, the board of The Kansas Historical Foundation, and the Kansas US 250 Commission.
Consulting Historian
Audio Engineer and EditorEmily Milner
Emily is a multimedia and audio-visual artist in Kansas City with a diverse practice ranging from documentary filmmaking, music videos, and live video performance to sculpture, costuming, and practical SFX.
Curriculum Design SpecialistCasey Meier
Casey is a History teacher and International Baccalaureate Coordinator at Campus High School in Haysville, KS. In addition to serving on the Kansas Council for History Education and being a Teacher Leader Consultant for Social Studies for the Kansas Department of Education, he is the KSDE representative on the Kansas 250 Commission.
The Per Aspera podcast is a project of the Kansas 250th Commission, made possible by generous support from Creative One, Walmart, and America250.
Licensing, Copyright & Fair Use Policy
Original content from Per Aspera: A Kansas History Podcast - including episode scripts, host narration, original research synthesis, show notes, and other materials created by the producers unless otherwise noted - is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). You are free to copy and redistribute this material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes, provided that: 1) Appropriate credit is given, 2) A link to the license is provided where practical, 3) The material is shared in its original form, and 4) No modified or adapted versions are distributed without permission. This license does not apply to third-party materials that may appear in the podcast or on this website, including archival audio, photographs, music, trademarks, documents, or other content owned by others. This podcast may include limited excerpts of copyrighted materials for purposes such as commentary, criticism, scholarship, teaching, news reporting, and historical interpretation. Such uses are believed to qualify as fair use under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act. No endorsement by quoted individuals, archives, rights holders, or institutions is implied.