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.
Signature Event Video Video Signature Event Audio Audio Signature Event Interview Interviews
E.g., 2019/03/19
E.g., 2019/03/19

Kessler's Historic Parks and Boulevards: A Green Framework for a Great Kansas City

Making a Great City
Kurt Culbertson, the chairman and CEO of Design Workshop and a George Kessler historian, launches a three-part study of Kansas City’s distinctive system of parks and boulevards with a look at the visionary, late-19th-century landscape architect who designed them.
 
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Kurt Culbertson, the chairman and CEO of Design Workshop and a George Kessler historian, launches a three-part study of Kansas City’s distinctive system of parks and boulevards with a look at the visionary, late-19th-century landscape architect who designed them.
Tuesday, March 5, 2019
Reception: 
6 pm
Program: 
6:30 pm
Plaza Branch
Event AudioEvent Videos

The Challenges of Reading in a Digital Age

Renowned cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf discusses the challenges – and dangers – of reading increasingly on screens. It’s not as sustained and deep. People tend to stick with the simple and familiar, eschewing new voices and viewpoints. Society suffers.
 
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Renowned cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf discusses the challenges – and dangers – of reading increasingly on screens. It’s not as sustained and deep. People tend to stick with the simple and familiar, eschewing new voices and viewpoints. Society suffers.
Monday, March 4, 2019
Program: 
6:30 pm
Plaza Branch
Event Audio

Mozart and Handel: The Makings of Genius

As a renowned conductor, and as a scholar, teacher, and author, Jane Glover’s command of classical music is unparalleled.

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Weeks before she directs a four-night production of Mozart’s Cosí Fan Tutte at the Lyric Opera, internationally renowned conductor, scholar, and author Jane Glover discusses her books on two of history’s transcendent composers: Mozart’s Women: His Family, His Friends, His Music and Handel in London: The Making of a Genius.
Thursday, February 28, 2019
Program: 
6:30 pm
Plaza Branch
Event Audio

Echoes of Grant: The Second World War Leadership of Dwight Eisenhower

One of the nation’s top military historians, John McManus of the Missouri University of Science and Technology, examines the influence of Ulysses S. Grant on the military and presidential leadership of Dwight D. Eisenhower. It continues a series of events coinciding with the exhibit Eisenhower’s Middle Road.
 
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One of the nation’s top military historians, John McManus of the Missouri University of Science and Technology, examines the influence of Ulysses S. Grant on the military and presidential leadership of Dwight D. Eisenhower. It continues a series of events coinciding with the Library exhibit Eisenhower’s Middle Road.
Wednesday, February 27, 2019
Reception: 
6 pm
Program: 
6:30 pm
Central Library
Event Audio

From Around Here

Columbus Junction, Iowa, doesn’t fit the Midwest small-town stereotype. As large agricultural operations and meat processing plants have become prominent rural employers, people from Latin America, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere are drawn in to work. White residents are moving away. Small towns are increasingly diverse.

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Photographer Lara Shipley and journalist Ann Friedman examine the shifting demographics of small-town Columbus Junction, Iowa – little more than an hour north of the Missouri border and a microcosm of the regional, national, and international impact of migration.
Thursday, February 21, 2019
Program: 
6:30 pm
Central Library
Event Audio

On Writing, on Race

Writers at Work

Two distinctive writers and educators join local novelist Whitney Terrell in a discussion of their craft and our nation’s fraught dialogue on race.

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Two distinctive African American writers and educators – Kennesaw State University’s Anthony Grooms and the University of Kentucky’s DaMaris Hill – join local novelist Whitney Terrell in a Writers at Work discussion of their craft and our nation’s fraught dialogue on race.
Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Program: 
6:30 pm
Plaza Branch
Event Audio

Melting Pot or Civil War?

Reihan Salam sees the United States’ immigration crisis as solvable. It requires … ahem, compromise.

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Reihan Salam, executive editor of National Review and the son of Bangladeshi immigrants, discusses his book Melting Pot or Civil War? A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders. It sees the United States’ immigration crisis as solvable with … ahem, compromise.
Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Program: 
6:30 pm
Plaza Branch
Event Audio

The New Localism

Bruce Katz, director of Drexel University’s Nowak Metro Finance Lab, discusses his book The New Localism: How Cities Can Thrive in the Age of Populism. Coauthored with the late Jeremy Nowak, it explores an ongoing shift from increasingly dysfunctional models of national governance to more flexible, multi-stakeholder forms of local authority.
 
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Bruce Katz, director of Drexel University’s Nowak Metro Finance Lab, discusses his book The New Localism: How Cities Can Thrive in the Age of Populism. Coauthored with the late Jeremy Nowak, it explores an ongoing shift from increasingly dysfunctional models of national governance to more flexible, multi-stakeholder forms of local authority.
Wednesday, February 13, 2019
Reception: 
6 pm
Program: 
6:30 pm
Plaza Branch
Event Audio

Charting America's Economic Course

One of the architects of America’s current monetary policy started small. Esther George, then a teenager, stuffed canceled checks into customers’ monthly statements in her first summer job at a local bank. She worked her way up to teller.

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The president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City sits down with Library Director Crosby Kemper III for a public conversation ranging from her small-town roots (in Faucett, Missouri, some 20 minutes south of St. Joseph) to her take on the country’s and Kansas City’s economies.
Tuesday, February 12, 2019
Reception: 
6 pm
Program: 
6:30 pm
Plaza Branch
Event Audio

Through the Photographer's Lens: Kansas City's African American Community

Missouri Valley Sundays

Powerful imagery of protests and violence helped bring attention to America's civil rights movement. Black photographers of the era broadened the nation’s view, also capturing a wide range of social activities in the African American community.

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Delia Cook Gillis of the University of Central Missouri looks at the work of William Fambrough, Matthew Washington, and other black photographers who documented the African American experience in Kansas City during the civil rights era – from church, school, and social activities to the realities of segregation and struggle for equality.
Sunday, February 10, 2019
Program: 
2:00 pm
Central Library
Event Audio

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