Event Audio

Author Robert W. Merry wraps up the presidential election – and the Hail to the Chiefs series – with a fresh, playful, and challenging way of rating our presidents. He is the author of Where They Stand: The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians.

Merry has been a Washington correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and the executive editor of Congressional Quarterly.

Co-presented with the Truman Library Institute; co-sponsored by KCUR’s Up To Date.

The result of uncontrolled plowing on the Great Plains, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s turned prairies into deserts and unleashed a pattern of massive and deadly dust storms. Children contracted “dust pneumonia,” businesses collapsed, and thousands lost their land and were forced on the road.

A screening of excerpts from Ken Burns' The Dust Bowl will be followed by a panel discussion headlined by the documentary’s writer and co-producer Dayton Duncan.

Co-sponsored by KCPT and the University of Kansas Libraries.

Historian Terry Beckenbaugh maintains that the Civil War was inevitable given the failure of the nation’s political leadership to resolve fundamental questions over the nature of the American republic and the meaning of constitutional liberty.

Beckenbaugh examines the leaders of the North and the South, the issues and ideologies that drove debate, and the effect politics had on the war.

Beckenbaugh is an assistant professor of military history at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Think you know Charles Dickens? Help celebrate the bicentennial of the great Victorian novelist’s birth with a special performance by members of Kansas City’s acting community. In The Dickens You Hardly Know they will perform five scenes from five Dickens books in just 50 minutes.

The evening kicks off What the Dickens? a fall-long series of Dickens-themed events that include book discussion groups, a film series and a new dramatic interpretation of A Christmas Carol created and performed by area teens.