Kansas City, Missouri in the context of "City Beautiful movement"

Missouri (see pronunciation) is a landlocked state in the Midwestern region of the United States. Ranking 21st in land area, it borders Iowa to the north, Illinois, Kentucky and Tennessee to the east, Arkansas to the south and Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska to the west. In the south are the Ozarks, a forested highland, providing timber, minerals, and recreation. At 1.5 billion years old, the St. Francois Mountains are among the oldest in the world. The Missouri River, after which the state is named, flows through the center and into the Mississippi River, which forms the eastern border. With over six million residents, it is the 19th-most populous state of the country. The largest urban areas are St. Louis, Kansas City, Springfield, and Columbia. The capital is Jefferson City.

Humans have inhabited present-day Missouri for at least 12,000 years. The Mississippian culture, which emerged in the ninth century, built cities with pyramidal and other ceremonial mounds before declining in the 14th century. The Indigenous Osage and Missouria nations inhabited the area when European people arrived in the 17th century. The French incorporated the territory into Louisiana, founding Ste. Genevieve in 1735 and St. Louis in 1764. After a brief period of Spanish rule, the United States acquired Missouri as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Americans from the Upland South rushed into the new Missouri Territory, taking advantage of its productive agricultural plains; Missouri played a central role in the westward expansion of the United States. Missouri was admitted as a slave state as part of the Missouri Compromise of 1820. As a border state, Missouri's role in the American Civil War was complex, and it was subject to rival governments, raids, and guerilla warfare. After the war, both Greater St. Louis and the Kansas City metropolitan area became large centers of industrialization and business.

Following are the metropolitan or metropolitan statistical areas of Missouri with population statistics:

Ubbe Ert "Ub" Iwerks (/ʌb ˈaɪwɜːrks/ ub EYE-wurks; March 24, 1901 – July 7, 1971), was an American animator, cartoonist, character designer, inventor, and special effects technician. He was known for his early work with Walt Disney, especially for having worked on the creation of Mickey Mouse and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, among other characters.

Iwerks and Disney met in 1919 while working at an art studio in Kansas City. After briefly working as illustrators for a local newspaper company, they ventured into animation together. Iwerks joined Disney as chief animator on the Laugh-O-Gram shorts series beginning in 1922, but a studio bankruptcy would cause Disney to relocate to Los Angeles in 1923. In the new studio, Iwerks continued to work with Disney on the Alice Comedies as well as the creation of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Following the first Oswald short, both Universal Pictures and the Winkler Pictures production company insisted that the Oswald character be redesigned. At the insistence of Disney, Iwerks designed a number of new characters for the studio, including designs that would be used for Clarabelle Cow and Horace Horsecollar.

Harry S. Truman (May 8, 1884 – December 26, 1972) was the 33rd president of the United States, serving from 1945 to 1953. As the 34th vice president in 1945, he assumed the presidency upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt that year. Subsequently, Truman implemented the Marshall Plan in the aftermath of World War II to rebuild the economy of Western Europe, and established both the Truman Doctrine and NATO to contain the expansion of Soviet communism. A member of the Democratic Party, he proposed numerous New Deal coalition liberal domestic reforms, but few were enacted by the conservative coalition that dominated the United States Congress.

Born in Lamar, Missouri, Truman was raised in Independence, Missouri, and during World War I fought in France as a captain in the Field Artillery. Returning home, he opened a haberdashery in Kansas City, Missouri, and was elected as a judge of Jackson County in 1922. Truman was elected to the U.S. Senate for Missouri in 1934. Between 1940 and 1944, he gained national prominence as the chairman of the Truman Committee, which aimed to reduce waste and inefficiency in wartime contracts. Truman was elected vice president in the 1944 presidential election and became president upon Roosevelt's death in April 1945. Only then was he told about the ongoing Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb. Truman authorized the first and only use of nuclear weapons in war against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Kansas City metropolitan area is a bi-state metropolitan area anchored by Kansas City, Missouri. Its fourteen counties straddle the border between the U.S. states of Missouri (nine counties) and Kansas (five counties). The 8,472 square miles (21,940 km) 2024 estimated census calculated a population of more than 2.2 million people, it is the second-largest metropolitan area centered in Missouri (after Greater St. Louis) and is the largest metropolitan area in Kansas, though Wichita is the largest metropolitan area centered in Kansas. Alongside Kansas City, Missouri, these are the suburbs with populations above 100,000: Overland Park, Kansas; Kansas City, Kansas; Olathe, Kansas; Independence, Missouri; and Lee's Summit, Missouri.

Cultural attractions include the American Jazz Museum, the Kansas City Symphony, Kansas City Union Station, the National World War I Museum, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, the National Agricultural Center and Hall of Fame, Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, Arabia Steamboat Museum, Uptown Theater, Midland Theatre, the Kansas City Zoo, Swope Park (featuring Starlight Theater), Sandstone Amphitheater, the Kansas City Renaissance Festival, Worlds of Fun, Oceans of Fun, the College Basketball Experience, the NWSL’s Kansas City Current, and several casinos. Major league sports franchises include the NFL's Kansas City Chiefs, the MLB's Kansas City Royals, and the MLS's Sporting Kansas City. The Kansas Speedway is owned by NASCAR.

A war memorial is a building, monument, statue, or other edifice to celebrate a war or victory, or (predominating in modern times) to commemorate those who died or were injured in a war.

The history of Asian art includes a vast range of arts from various cultures, regions, and religions across the continent of Asia. Asian art is typically divided into broad blocks: East Asian art includes works from China, Japan, Korea and Tibetan art, while Southeast Asian art includes the arts of Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar (Burma), the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. Historically, South Asian art mostly falls under Indian art, which encompasses the arts of the Indian subcontinent, while Central Asian art covers that region. West Asian art encompasses the arts of the Ancient Near East including Mesopotamian art and Persian art, and more recently becoming dominated by Islamic art.

In many ways, the history of Eastern art parallels the development of Western art. The art histories of Asia and Europe repeatedly intertwine, with Asian art greatly influencing European art, and vice versa; the Eurasian cultures mixed through methods such as steppe-nomad migrations,followed successively by the Silk Road transmission of art, the cultural exchange of the Age of Discovery and Western colonization, and through the Internet and modern globalization.