Previous Special Events

As 1862 began the U.S. government was overwhelmed, the Treasury was broke, and the Confederacy was winning on the battlefield. A year later, under the leadership of an unschooled country lawyer, the tide had turned.

Drawing from his book Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year, journalist/historian David Von Drehle explains how Lincoln fashioned a victory and set the blueprint for modern America.

Von Drehle has written for the Washington Post and Time magazine; among his books is Why They Fought: The Real Reason for the Civil War.

In his new book Who Stole the American Dream?, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hedrick Smith shows how over the last 40 years seismic changes, sparked by a sequence of landmark political and economic decisions, have all but eliminated the idea of shared prosperity, with America losing the title of “Land of Opportunity.”

Smith is a former reporter and editor for The New York Times and an Emmy Award-winning producer/correspondent for the PBS show Frontline. Among his books are The Russians, The New Russians, The Media and the Gulf War, and Rethinking America.

From the work of former commercial artist and window display designer Andy Warhol to billboard painter James Rosenquist, the American advertising world helped to inform and inspire the Pop Art movement. Arts educator Carol Inge Hockett explores the painting, sculpture, and printmaking of Warhol, Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann, and Claes Oldenburg, as well as the work of pop poet Ronald Gross.

Hockett is coordinator of the School and Family Programs at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University and formerly worked at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

Pat O’Neill looks at the colorful history of the Irish in Kansas City – particularly as it played out on both sides of the law – in this presentation designed to augment the Library’s current exhibit about the Kansas City Police Department, Kansas City’s Finest.

O’Neill is a proud son of Erin whose father created the local St. Patrick’s Day Parade. He is the owner of O’Neill Marketing & Event Management, and the author of From the Bottom Up: The Story of the Irish in Kansas City.

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.

Eighteen-sixty-nine was indeed a year of sweeping changes in Kansas City, Missouri. It introduced the arrival of perhaps the most influential of technological additions ever to be made to the area—the Hannibal Bridge. It also marked the year when Annie Chambers arrived, ready to begin a new career in the thriving town. Both signaled the beginning of a new age in the Midwestern cow town.

Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar goes into Hitchcock mode for this tale of illicit love and brutal revenge. A film director accepts financing from a ruthless industrialist and falls for the man’s beautiful mistress (Penelope Cruz), who is starring in the movie.
The story is told in flashback as the director – now blind and surviving by writing screenplays – looks back on the turning point in his life and career.

In Canada, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Ford introduces us to teenager Del Parsons, who after his parents’ imprisonment for bank robbery flees his Montana home, beginning a new life on the Saskatchewan prairie.

Ford reads from Canada and holds a conversation with UMKC Writer-in-Residence Whitney Terrell, organizer of the Writers at Work series. Ford is the author of the Bascombe novels, which include The Sportswriter and its sequels, Independence Day and The Lay of the Land.

Co-sponsored by the Writers at Work Roundtable and the UMKC English Department.

Veteran journalist Carl M. Cannon discusses the life of first lady Michele Obama on Wednesday, March 6, 2013, at 6:30 p.m. at the Plaza Branch, 4801 Main St.

Michelle Obama is the 46th first lady of the United States, caretaker of an unpaid position that nevertheless is one of the most powerful in the world. How powerful? Put it this way: Even in this rarified air, Mrs. Obama stands out for her closeness to the president.

From Adelaide in Guys and Dolls to Nina in In the Heights and Elphaba in Wicked, female characters in Broadway musicals have belted and crooned their way into the American psyche. Author Stacy Wolf looks not just at female characters but at women performers and creators to chronicle the evolution of feminist thought in this singularly American theatrical form.

Wolf is a professor of theater and director of the Princeton Atelier at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. She is the author of A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical.