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Signature Event Archive: Audio
Search the Signature Event Archive to discover past Library events. Watch videos, hear speaker interviews, and listen to audio recordings of previous presentations. Search by keyword (event title, subject, or presenter name), location or by date range.
In a discussion of his book Mount Washington Cemetery: In Search of Lost Time, local historian Bruce Mathews spotlights the contributions of those buried in the historic cemetery – including mountain man Jim Bridger and newspaper mogul William Rockhill Nelson – and examines efforts to preserve its historically significant landmarks.
Perhaps no one took more meaning from the advent of the automobile—and its promise of freedom and adventure, power and self-expression—than African Americans. With the aid of the famed Green Book and other travel guides, black-only businesses, and informal communication networks, they could navigate the mid-20th century’s Jim Crow landscape.
Beverly Daniel Tatum, president emerita of Spelman College and an authority on racial issues in the U.S., looks anew at the challenges she addressed in her bestselling book on the psychology of racism, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?. Two decades later, we still are struggling to understand what racism is, how it impacts us all, and what we can do about it.
In their current solo exhibitions Sanctuaries and kaleidoscope, Kansas City artists Amy and Misha Kligman explore the parallel paths of personal experience that have taken the couple to distinctly different creative ends.
Nationwide, we’ve built cities we can’t afford. Kansas City is among them, able to budget just 10 percent of recommended street maintenance in 2019 and hitting a similar financial wall on sewers and water lines.
As the first of 70,000 U.S. Marines swept onto Iwo Jima on February 19, 1945, victory was all but certain. The Americans had an overwhelming numerical advantage and aerial superiority, isolating the island and preventing Japanese retreat and the arrival of reinforcements. But the dug-in enemy fought ferociously, and the fighting lasted 36 of the bloodiest days of World War II.
In a discussion of her new book, Towson University’s Jeannie Vanasco walks through her lingering trauma, feelings of betrayal, and need for accountability more than a decade her rape by a close friend from high school. Setting the #MeToo-era memoir apart: She also gives voice to her attacker, who spoke to Vanasco at length.
In a discussion of her memoir Smacked, former New York Times business columnist Eilene Zimmerman looks at the troubling pervasiveness of drug addiction in such high-pressure, white-collar professions as law, finance, and technology – a discovery she made after the stunning, drug-induced death of her former husband.
Arguments in the divisive right-to-die debate range from legal to spiritual, ethical, and social. Longtime public radio host and podcaster Diane Rehm found her position and voice—in favor of laws allowing the terminally ill to end their lives with medical assistance—with the 2014 death of her husband.
Merriam-Webster has thrown its considerable weight behind the use of “they” as a singular, gender-neutral pronoun, expanding its dictionary definition and then proclaiming “they” the 2019 Word of the Year. Traditionalists and other critics argue: miscarriage of meaning!