Let the Library help you find your next great summer page-turner.
Guy Gugliotta discusses his new book about the raising of the U.S. Capitol, a process steeped in irony.
Even as the majestic structure rose, the Union it represented was drifting toward Civil War. Among the historic characters in this drama was Jefferson Davis, a big supporter of the project – until he left Washington to become president of the Confederacy. (And the engineer in charge of construction, Montgomery Meigs, feuded bitterly with the architect, Thomas U. Walter).
Musician/historian James Christopher Edwards brings the Civil War in Kansas and Missouri to life in this musical program about the notorious bushwacker “Bloody” Bill Anderson.
Edwards’ program is drawn from his new CD Blood on the Border, a musical narrative about Quantrill’s Raiders. Edwards has taught classical and folk guitar, and holds a master’s degree in history (with an emphasis on the Civil War in Missouri) from the University of Missouri.
Adam Arenson, assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at El Paso, examines the efforts of St. Louis’ intellectuals and mercantile elite to make their city the capital of a vast Western empire in the wake of the Civil War.
That ambitious dream was never realized, but the city grew to be a vital cultural and commercial hub. The largest city along the border between free and slave states, St. Louis became a microcosm of the dueling moral systems and competing national visions that dominated mid-19th century America.
Shawn Faulkner of the Military History Department at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth discusses the conditions faced by the average Civil War soldier – on and off the battlefield – in a presentation titled Jonny Reb and Billy Yank.
Faulkner explains the many factors that shaped the daily lives of the soldiers, including the quality and availability of food, clothing, shelter and medical care. Faulkner also answers the question: What motivated soldiers on both sides to fight and to endure the hardships of war?
The Border Reconstructed and Remembered, moderated by Gary Kremer, The State Historical Society of Missouri, and featuring talks by:
Aaron Astor, Maryville College; The Lexington Weekly Caucasian: White Supremacist Discourse in Post-Civil War Western Missouri
John McKerley, The State Historical Society of Missouri; Across the Bloody Chasm: Race, Liberalism, and the Reconstruction of Missouri Politics
Sectional Crisis and Civil War on the Western Border, 1860-1865, moderated by William Piston, Missouri State University, and featuring talks by:
Randy Mullis, Command and General Staff College; The Illusion of Security and the Fragility of Peace: Kansas and Missouri on the Eve of the Civil War
Jonathan Earle, University of Kansas; “If I Went West, I Think I Would Go To Kansas”: Abraham Lincoln, the Sunflower State, and the Election of 1860
The Border Wars Conference, featuring sessions at both the Central Library and the Plaza Branch, offers an exploration of this most uncivil of wars while providing insight into the ways in which societies can be fragmented by ideology and ultimately rebuilt upon different lines.
Michael Fellman, a preeminent scholar of the American Civil War and an expert on the guerilla warfare that characterized the conflict in the Missouri-Kansas borderlands, considers how perfectly ordinary Americans could revise their moral and religious beliefs to justify such extraordinary violence with relative ease. Selectively picking texts from Holy Scripture, they assembled a war God perfectly suited to their actions out of Christian belief.
On Saturday, November 5, 2011, at 2 pm, Gary Jenkins will be showing a short version of his video "Negroes to Hire" which explores the history of slavery in Missouri. It takes its name from an advertisement in the Library Tribune where Clay County slave masters let it be known that they had slaves who could be hired by others.
Historian Terry Beckenbaugh of the Military History Department at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth discusses The First Year of the Civil War in Missouri.
