June Signature Event Recap

Wednesday, July 8, 2020
During June 2020, the Library hosted a variety of programs that hit on a several timely issues, such as COVID-19 to Black Lives Matter.
Check out our latest roundup of signature event videos from the past month.
Signature Event Archive  |  More Videos  |  Youtube.com/KCLibrary  |  Upcoming Signature Events
Night of the Assassins
Howard Blum

June 3, 2020
46 minutes

In a discussion of his new book Night of the Assassins: The Untold Story of Hitler's Plot to Kill FDR, Churchill, and Stalin, author Howard Blum detailed the plan by an all-but-defeated Adolf Hitler to assassinate the Allies’ Big Three – Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin – while they were gathered in Tehran, Iran, late in 1943.





 

Afropessimism
Frank B. Wilderson III, Lorenzo Butler

June 9, 2020
1 hour, 10 minutes

University of California, Irvine, professor Frank B. Wilderson, one of our most profound scholars on the African American experience, discussed his new book Afropessimism and its heightened relevance in the wake of the death of George Floyd at the hands of four Minneapolis police officers. The book takes its name from an increasingly prominent intellectual movement that sees blackness through the lens of perpetual slavery. Wilderson was joined by former Library media specialist Lorenzo Butler in an expanded conversation on the persistent issues confronting African Americans.



 
College Sports in the COVID-19 Era
Jeff Long, Jim Sterk, Steve Wieberg 

June 16, 2020
1 hour, 17 minutes

As America’s major spectator sports plot a return from their COVID-19-induced hiatus, University of Missouri Athletics Director Jim Sterk and Kansas AD Jeff Long examined the challenges across all sports and, more specifically, the questions and challenges unique to college athletics. The Library’s Steve Wieberg, a former USA Today reporter who focused on college athletics, moderatesdthe discussion.



 

Midwestern Strange
B.J. Hollars, Kaite Stover

June 18, 2020
1 hour, 10 minutes

Wisconsin author and English professor B.J. Hollars joined the Library’s Kaite Stover in a discussion of his book Midwestern Strange: Hunting Monsters, Martians and the Weird in Flyover Country, exploring the oddities and locally treasured myths of middle America – tales of monsters and events and encounters “that are improvable either as events or illusions.” Think dining-table-sized snapping turtles and a UFO encounter that left a Wisconsin plumber with a plate of alien-made pancakes.




 

Signature Event Archive  |  More Videos  |  Youtube.com/KCLibrary  |  Upcoming Signature Events
Signature Events