Previous Special Events

A specialist in the Atomic Age, Michael Scheibach examines how Americans in the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s dealt with the threat of nuclear annihilation with an emphasis on the impact of Civil Defense drills, merchandising campaigns using atomic imagery, and popular entertainments like comic books and science fiction movies.

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.

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.

The plays and poetry of William Shakespeare have inspired some of the world’s most beautiful music.

This performance by members of the Bach Aria Soloists, including violinist Elizabeth Suh Lane and guitarist Beau Bledsoe, will feature the music of Bach, Purcell, Handel, and Mendelssohn.

Between musical selections, the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival presents scenes from Shakespeare’s plays performed by local actors John Rensenhouse and Cinnamon Schultz.

Why study Freud? Harvard Medical School’s Edison K. Miyawaki, author of What to Read on Love, not Sex: Freud, Fiction, and the Articulation of Truth in Modern Psychological Science employs Freud’s affection for stories culled from our collective cultural past to explain modern psychology. The result is a book that literary critic Harold Bloom describes as “a heartening and moving reconsideration of Freud’s legacy.”

Anthony Swofford's new memoir, Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails, chronicles how in the years after the success of his book Jarhead, he went on a binge of self-destructive excess. He lost almost everything and everyone that mattered to him.

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.

Children and parents are invited to be part of monthly interactive story times presented by the Coterie Theatre. Coterie Theatre artists read from favorite children's books while audience members enjoy an opportunity to "jump into the story" and then participate in an improvised story of their own making.

For prize-winning geographer James Shortridge, Kansas City is more than the sum of cultural icons like barbecue, jazz, and sports teams. In his new book he explores more than a century of change and how Kansas City came to look and function the way it does.

He explores suburbanization, changing modes of transportation and personalities such as Tom Pendergast, J.C. Nichols, and Kay Waldo Barnes, whose policies shaped the metropolitan area.

Shortridge is professor of geography at the University of Kansas.

Friday Night Family Fun welcomes two regional storytellers for an evening of animated stories and folk music.

Rosie Cutrer has been telling stories professionally for the past 17 years at various venues. Cutrer gears her storytelling to both adults and children and often accompanies herself on the banjo.

Marilyn Kinsella spent 16 years as the storyteller for the Edwardsville Public Library in Edwardsville, Illinois. She currently travels around the St. Louis and southern Illinois region as a freelance storyteller.