Event Archive

Search our archive of past events at the Library! You can search by keyword - such as event title, subject, or presenter name - or by a date range. To search for an exact phrase, put it in quotation marks. If you know the specific date of an event, enter the same date in both fields. Search results will only show events that match ALL entered terms.

Format: 2013-05-23
Format: 2013-05-23
  • After touring the South, comic travel writer Chuck Thompson wonders if it isn’t once again time for Dixie to secede from the Union.
    Tuesday, September 25, 2012

    Isn’t it about time for the South to once again secede from the Union? Comic travel writer Chuck Thompson thinks so, arguing that the South is not and never has been wholly committed to being part of the United States.

    Thompson discusses his new book Better Off Without ‘Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession and dishes insight, humor, fearless politics, and sheer nerve. And lots of laughs. The book is based on his recent travels south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

  • Award-winning reporter Eleanor Clift joins Library Director Crosby Kemper III for a public conversation about the 2012 presidential election.
    Monday, September 24, 2012

    Reporter/pundit Eleanor Clift joins Kansas City Public Library Director Crosby Kemper III for a public conversation about 2012 presidential election.

    Today electing a president is vastly more complex an undertaking than what was envisioned by the Founding Fathers. Yet the process remains exciting and hugely important. And if it is sometimes disillusioning, it can also be inspiring.

  • Roosevelt biographer Alan Brinkley examines the life and influence of the man who forever changed international diplomacy, the party system, and the role of government here and abroad.
    Sunday, September 23, 2012

    No president since the founders has done more to shape American government than Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

    Alan Brinkley argues that Roosevelt’s presidency forever changed the face of international diplomacy, the American party system, and the government’s role in global and domestic policy.

    Brinkley is one of just three American historians to have been Harmsworth Professor at Oxford and Pitt Professor of American history at Cambridge.

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

  • Off-the-Wall Film Series: The Runaways (2010)
    Friday, September 21, 2012

    City Market watering hole Harry’s Country Club has joined forces with the Library to bring rock ‘n’ roll movies to the summer Off-the-Wall film series. Entitled Procreation, Pharmaceuticals, and Backbeat-Driven/Blues-Based Music (think about it), this series dishes comedy, a dash of drama, and a whole lot of toe-tapping, head-bobbing (if not head-banging) music.

  • Author Jamal Joseph discusses his life as a member of the Black Panther Party, prison inmate, activist, poet, filmmaker, and professor at Columbia University, the school he once claimed should be burned down.
    Friday, September 21, 2012

    As a member of the Black Panther Party, Jamal Joseph advocated burning Columbia University to the ground. Forty years later he’s a professor at Columbia. In his memoir Panther Baby Jamal takes readers from his Bronx childhood to Leavenworth prison and his current career in the arts.

    Joseph is executive artistic producer of the New Heritage Theater in Harlem. In 2008 he was nominated for an Academy Award for his contributions to the song “Raise It Up” from the film August Rush.

  • Be a part of the studio audience as KCPT tapes the latest installment of Meet the Past when Crosby Kemper III interviews President Thomas Jefferson, as portrayed by Patrick Lee.
    Thursday, September 20, 2012

    Meet the Past with Crosby Kemper III returns for a conversation with Thomas Jefferson, as portrayed by Patrick Lee.

    Jefferson, America’s third president and author of the Declaration of Independence, was also a big supporter of the humanities.

    The event will be taped by KCPT for later broadcast.

  • Want to be prepared for the presidential election? Learn about voter deadlines, provisional ballots, new voter ID cards, ID’s required at the polls and much more. Forms will be available to register voters.
    Thursday, September 20, 2012

    Want to be prepared for the presidential election? Learn about voter deadlines, provisional ballots, new voter ID cards, ID’s required at the polls and much more. Forms will be available to register voters.

    This is one of a series of public forums on elections presented by the KCEB and the Library this spring and summer.

  • A panel of historians from the U.S. Army Command and General Staff college of Fort Leavenworth examine the Civil War battle that provided the single bloodiest day of fighting in U.S. military history and led to the Emancipation Proclamation.
    Tuesday, September 18, 2012

    The Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862 is the bloodiest day in American military history. Now, exactly 150 years later, a panel of historians discusses the events of that day.

    Leading his Confederate troops into Maryland for their first fight on Union soil, Robert E. Lee was met at Antietam Creek by George McClellan’s federals. The battle claimed 23,000 casualties and resulted in a standoff. But after that the Union believed it could win, giving President Abraham Lincoln the confidence to issue his Emancipation Proclamation.

  • Historian Bob Priddy examines the important but all-too-often underappreciated artistic elements of the Missouri Statehouse.
    Sunday, September 16, 2012

    In 1911 art-minded Missourians hired the nation’s leading artists to decorate the new Missouri statehouse, and the works they created were considered among the finest to adorn any state capitol. Historian Bob Priddy describes these treasures – many of which go unnoticed and unappreciated even by those who daily walk the building’s marble halls.

    Priddy is news director at the Missourinet, a statewide commercial radio network. Among his books are The Art of the Missouri Capitol: History in Canvas, Bronze, and Stone (with Jeffrey Ball).

  • Think you’re film literate? Not until you’ve experienced the masterpieces of world cinema presented as part of this
    Sunday, September 16, 2012

     

    Twenty Films Essential to Cinema Literacy

    Think you’re film literate? Not until you’ve experienced the masterpieces of world cinema presented as part of this new series. Former Kansas City Star film critic Robert W. Butler (now a member of the Library’s Public Affairs staff) provides opening and closing remarks.