Previous Special Events

The Kansas City Star’s Dave Helling and an expert panel discuss whether it is time for control of the Kansas City Police Department to revert from the state back to the city. Participants include former Police Commissioner Karl Zobrist, former Police Chief Jim Corwin, City Councilman Ed Ford, and Steve Glorioso, who led a campaign to change St. Louis’ police governance law.

Abigail Adams, the wife of one president and the mother of a second, was significant not only for her accomplishments as a diarist and letter writer but for the influence she had on successive generations of the Adams family. Scholar Henry Adams, the great-great-great-great-great grandson of Abigail and John Adams, looks at his forbear’s life and writing, especially her often caustic impressions of the Founding Fathers.

Presented by the Financial Planners Association

The Kansas City Public Library is hosting Money Smart Month adult programs across all Library locations during April 2013. Topics range from budgeting to investing to effective couponing.

The Library will waive up to $30 in overdue fines and fees for any Kansas City Public Library cardholder who attends one or more of the events.

The six-week program America’s Music: A Film History of Our Popular Music from Blues to Bluegrass to Broadway kicks off with excerpts from the films Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: Episode 1, Feel Like Going Home (2004) and Say Amen, Somebody (1983). Then UMKC musicologist Andrew Granade and special guest Pat Nichols, a Lawrence-based musician who specializes in the Delta blues, leads the audience in an investigation of blues as a source of our contemporary sounds.

Historian James G. Basker discusses his new book, a collection of writings reflecting our nation’s long, heated confrontation with that poisonous evil, slavery. This vast reservoir of abolitionist literature flowed from the pens of Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, anonymous editorialists, and freed slaves. Basker is the editor of a new book, American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation, published by the Library of America.

This 2003 documentary looks at Bayard Rustin, one of the unheralded pioneers of the Civil Rights movement, who over six decades fought for freedom and equality and debated radical black leaders like Malcolm X and Stokley Carmichael.

Admission is free.

LEARN Science & Math Club is coming to the Library to build with us! Kids ages 6 – 12 will have a blast designing and constructing people-sized teepees. And, while they’re at it, the kids will learn a little structural engineering and team-building, too! Join us for two hours of wacky creations and fun!

LEARN Science & Math Club provides rich science and math experiences through the use of robotics and engineering projects, fostering kids’ collaboration and communication skills.

Think of it as a husband-and-wife tag-team poetry slam.

Kansas City poets Stanley E. Banks and Janet M. Banks read from their new books (respectively) Blue Issues and On the Edge of Urban in a demonstration of how poetry can capture the power of inner-city voices.

Stanley’s poetry offers city grit with a blues and jazz undertone. Janet’s poetry has city grit as well, but with an urban woman’s perspective. This African-American couple is known for firing up audiences wherever they give a reading.

Traveling has undergone some big changes in recent years. Now travel journalist Rudy Maxa provides tips to save money, maximize pleasure, and minimize hassles. He offers suggestions about where you should go right now, how to save money on hotels, why you should stop hoarding those frequent flyer miles, and why you should never ride a camel named Katherine in Khiva, Uzbekistan.

For her book The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, Theda Skocpol conducted grassroots interviews and visited local Tea Party gatherings throughout America. She discusses the past and future of the Tea Party movement and examines its dominant belief that benefits like Social Security and Medicare should be reserved for “real Americans” who have paid their dues by working and paying taxes.

Skocpol is Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University.

Presented as this year’s Park University Hauptman Lecture.