Event Archive

Over nearly two decades Lady Bird Johnson recorded 47 oral history interviews with historian Michael Gillette and his colleagues at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library. Now Gillette details Johnson’s stories of marriage to a powerful man, of creating a media empire, and of encounters with first ladies like Edith Bolling Wilson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Bess Truman.

This postcard tour of a bygone era offers views of Independence Boulevard (Kansas City’s first boulevard) and the rugged beauty of the city’s only urban Scenic Byway, Cliff Drive. Other featured spots include the Concourse, the Kansas City Museum, and breathtaking vistas across the Missouri River Valley.

Local historian and postcard collector Michael Bushnell presents a series of postcard tours of Kansas City neighborhoods. Bushnell is publisher of The Northeast News, a weekly community newspaper that serves the Historic Northeast area of Kansas City. He is also the author of Historic Postcards of Old Kansas City.

Hollywood has long been known as the Dream Factory. But what happens when the dream dies?

That's the story told by director Billy Wilder in Sunset Boulevard, which finds a broke screenwriter (William Holden) becoming the kept boy toy of a fading silent movie star (Gloria Swanson) who is so bent on a comeback that she's sliding into madness.

On May 4, 1886, a peaceful labor rally in Haymarket Square in Chicago erupted in violence. Four anarchists were convicted and hanged for their purported role in a bombing that resulted in the death of seven police officers and at least four civilians.

For much of a century the executions of the anarchists were widely viewed as a miscarraige of justice. But in a discussion of his book The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists: Terrorism and Justice in the Gilded Age, Timothy Messer-Kruse argues that the prosecution was solid. It was the anarchists’ lawyers who chose to ignore a sound defense and instead use the trial for political grandstanding.