1991-2010 Timeline

1991

January — Joan Finney becomes the 42nd governor of Kansas — and the first woman to serve in the position.

April 26 — Killer tornado hits Haysville, Wichita, McConnell Air Force Base and Andover.

Summer — Demonstrators come to Wichita to protest abortion in Operation Rescue's Summer of Mercy.

1992

June 18 — Russian leader Boris Yeltsin visits the Wichita area and a farmer harvesting wheat.

Monroe Elementary School in Topeka is named the Brown vs. Board of Education National Historic Site.

1995

Pizza Hut corporate headquarters move to Dallas.

1996

The National Park Service begins operation of the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. The 10,894-acre preserve typifies the vast tallgrass prairie ecosystem.

Bob Dole, Kansas senator, retires from the U.S. Senate and makes an unsuccessful bid for president.

1999

May 3 — An F4 tornado hits Haysville then Wichita in Sedgwick County, causing five deaths and many injuries.

August — Kansas makes national news with the state Board of Education's decision to remove evolution from its education standards.

San Diego computer backup service installs its software on all PCs in Protection, to promote the protection of data from Y2K digital glitches.

2000

Jack Kilby, who grew up in Great Bend, wins the Nobel Prize for physics. He is best known for inventing the forerunner of the microchip, which helped create the pocket calculator and the modern computer industry.

Dec. 7 — Relatives find the bodies of four young people in a house in the 1100 block of North Erie in Wichita.

Dec. 15 — Two brothers, Jonathan and Reginald Carr, shoot five young adults in a snowy Wichita field, killing four.

2001

Jan. 17 — An explosion rocks downtown Hutchinson as natural gas escapes from an underground storage facility. Two people are killed.

Sept. 11 — More than 300 Wichitans donate blood on the day of the terrorist attacks on the East Coast. In the skies, hundreds of airliners are ordered to land, 22 of them at Wichita Mid-Continent Airport, bringing hundreds of diverted travelers.

2002

Spring — Coleman Co. is asked to develop and manufacture all 14,000 torches for the 2002 Winter Games.

2004

Feb. 12 — Religious groups pack a Capitol hearing room to urge passage of a state constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

2005

Feb. 25 — A 60-year-old former dog catcher, Dennis Rader from Park City, is arrested and tied to 10 BTK killings dating to 1974.

2007

May 4 — An EF-5 tornado tears through Greensburg, destroying almost all the town.

November — For the first time in more than 100 years, state wildlife officials confirm that a mountain lion has been shot in Kansas.

2008

The University of Kansas defeats Memphis to win the men's national basketball title in San Antonio.