Topeka is the capital city of Kansas, a state in the middle of the United States. It is not one of America's big famous cities — it is a middle-sized city of maybe a couple of hundred thousand people, sitting on the Kansas River. Because it is the capital, the state government works there. The name is best known outside Kansas from history class: the court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954, when the US Supreme Court decided that separating Black and white children into different schools was against the law. That one case put the city's name into textbooks all over the world. Americans also sometimes use Topeka in a joking way to stand for 'an ordinary place far from the coast, nothing exciting happening' — the same way people here might name a small town to mean 'the middle of nowhere'. Note that the biggest city in Kansas is Wichita, not Topeka; the capital is often not the biggest city, in the US or anywhere.