Previous Special Events

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

Actor and author John Lithgow offers an entertaining afternoon of insight, anecdotes, and readings.

Lithgow, a Tony and Emmy award winner, is the star of stage (The Sweet Smell of Success), screen (The World According to Garp) and television (3rd Rock from the Sun, Dexter), as well as the author of many books for young readers including The Remarkable Farkle McBride.

Miss Nelson Is Missing is a humorous tale of a teacher who must go to outrageous extremes to deal with the most horribly-behaved class in her school.

Now Harry Allard and James Marshall’s perennially popular book for young readers comes to life in an interactive play performed by arts educator Andi Meyer.