KC Public Library Blog
Whittaker's Chambers
February 22, 1901: Charles Evans Whittaker, who will go on to become the first person from Kansas or Missouri to serve on the Supreme Court, is born on a farm near Troy, Kansas.
Program Notes: The Great Escape (1963)
It is possible to pinpoint precisely the moment that Steve McQueen became a movie star. It comes in the last 20 minutes of The Great Escape. It's so exciting you can taste it. And you know that the cocky, handsome, volatile actor was a bona fide movie star.
The Memphis Diaries of Ida B. Wells ed. by Miriam DeCosta-Willis
What were famous people like, before they became legends? There's something in us that wants to know. Movie theatres will often show high school graduation pictures of movie stars and ask, "Can you recognize this person?" Well, The Memphis Diaries of Ida B. Wells feeds the same curious urge.
Program Notes: Nights of Cabiria (1957)
In Nights of Cabiria actress Giulietta Masina and director Federico Fellini give us a funny, beguiling, and heartbreaking examination of innocence that has yet to be surpassed.
Program Notes: The Birds (1963)
Alfred Hitchcock liked to take chances. He took a huge one with The Birds, a story about our feathered friends turning homicidal and waging war on humanity with one of his most puzzling endings.
Words of Love
Looking for more books about good love gone bad, bad love that feels good and love in all the wrong places?
Check out our KCPL Pinterest page, Books of Love.
Love is Many Splendid Things
For women, it’s not about the stuff, it’s about the love. All-consuming love is just too intoxicating to ignore and after years growing up in the afterglow of the ERA and that “woman-man-fish-bicycle” mantra, we’re finding new targets for our passions. Hence, some women’s compulsive devotion to cats, firefighting, and shopping. Our personal obsessions make us who we are and you have to love us for them. Check out some of the books about what some women love and why.
Death of a Visionary
February 16, 1950: Jesse Clyde Nichols, who developed the Country Club Plaza and many housing developments throughout Kansas City, dies just six months before his 70th birthday at his Kansas City home.
Kansas Gets Its Governor
One hundred and two years ago, on Saturday February 9, 1861, the fervent abolitionist Charles Robinson was sworn into office as Kansas' first state governor.
Program Notes: Sleepless in Seattle (1993)
Sleepless in Seattle is a romantic comedy that slyly ridicules Hollywood's unrealistic depictions of love and at the same time wants to be the same sort of preposterous-but-beloved screen romance it spoofs.
Program Notes: Bye Bye Birdie (1963)
It says something that Bye Bye Birdie, a musical inspired by a very specific news story of the late 1950s and devised as a humorous commentary on the cultural ethos of that era, has over the last 50 years become timeless.
Monumental Undertaking
February 9, 1920: The City Council approves a plan to build Kansas City’s Liberty Memorial on the property south of Union Station.
Program Notes: The Big Sleep (1946)
Raymond Chandler, on whose novel The Big Sleep was based, confessed that even he couldn't figure out the plot of the movie version. But Bogie’s sardonic tough guy and the heat generated by Lauren Bacall make it a film noir classic.
Last Night at the Opera House
January 31, 1901: Fire spreads through the Coates Opera House, the center of high society life in Kansas City, damaging it so badly that it will not reopen.
Program Notes: Charade (1963)
Can violence be funny? That's not a question you'd expect from a movie starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, but that was the issue when the comedy thriller Charade hit America’s movie screens.