Event Audio

Local filmmaker Gary Jenkins unveils his new documentary about the western branch of the Underground Railroad that before and during the Civil War transported escaped slaves from the Kansas City area to freedom in the north.

At a post-screening discussion Jenkins will be joined by Jimmy S. Johnson III, whose great- grandfather escaped a Platte County slave farm, and William O. Wagnon, who has worked to preserve Topeka’s Ritchie House, once a stop on the Underground Railroad.

Adam Arenson, assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at El Paso, examines the efforts of St. Louis’ intellectuals and mercantile elite to make their city the capital of a vast Western empire in the wake of the Civil War.

That ambitious dream was never realized, but the city grew to be a vital cultural and commercial hub. The largest city along the border between free and slave states, St. Louis became a microcosm of the dueling moral systems and competing national visions that dominated mid-19th century America.

David Israel Litan made his living in the oil business, but art was his passion and his gift. His lithographs portraying scenes of Kansas and aspects of Jewish life and faith sold widely throughout the Sunflower State during his lifetime, most of which was spent in Wichita.

The artist’s son, Robert Litan, noted economist and senior executive at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, discusses his father’s art and faith.

University of Pennsylvania historian Stephanie McCurry offers a new interpretation of the Confederacy that contends the South sowed the seeds of its demise in creating a regime that excluded white women and slaves, which together comprised a majority of the population.

Confederate Reckoning was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for History. McCurry’s talk is the keynote address for the Richard D. McKinzie Research Symposium.

Co-sponsored by the University of Missouri-Kansas City Department of History.