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 her book Reclaiming Your Community: You Don’t Have to Move Out of Your Neighborhood to Live in a Better One, New York urban revitalization strategist and entrepreneur Majora Carter urges struggling, low-status communities to keep homegrown talent from moving away. Like the corporate world, she says, such areas need a retention plan. Her presentation continues the Library’s Making a Great City series.
Military historian Geoff Babb assesses the historical accuracy of the 1963 film 55 Days at Peking, which delivers an epic retelling of a central episode in China’s turn-of-the-20th-century Boxer Rebellion. It’s the latest installment of the Library’s Hollywood vs. History series in partnership with the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College.
Award-winning essayist and poet Taylor Brorby discusses his new memoir Boys and Oil, recounting the uneasiness of being gay in a rugged land of coal mining and fracking in rural North Dakota. An environmentalist, he uses the destruction of large swaths of the West as a metaphor for the distress of his youth.
Get the scoop behind Kansas City’s newest, biggest, and most family-friendly scavenger hunt. Anne Kniggendorf, a writer and editor at the Library, and her sister and co-author Leslie Kniggendorf talk to the Library’s Kaite Stover about their new book and the landmarks and hidden gems it challenges you to find across 20 metro-area towns.
Learn about the past, present, and future of vision loss during the premiere of the podcast and video series Foresight, produced by Kansas City’s Alphapointe. After a partial screening of Foresight, KSHB-TV reporter Rae Daniel moderates a panel discussion featuring Paterson (joining online), KCATA CEO and president Robbie Makinen, and crisis communications consultant David Westbrook about the challenges and successes of living with vision loss.
This year, prepare yourself for CAGE MATCH, a monthly pairing of two Nicolas Cage movies engaged in epic cinematic combat. Which films will be screened? That’s to be decided by YOU, the voting public.
David Mills and Kayla Westra, co-authors of Great Wartime Escapes and Rescues, assess the historical accuracy of the classic 1963 film The Great Escape – the latest installment of the Library’s Hollywood vs. History series in partnership with the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College.
***One Step Forward, Two Steps … Backlash and the related Making History exhibit have been postponed. Information will be posted to kclibrary.org when we are able to reschedule.***
Sociologist, criminologist, and social worker Reuben Jonathan Miller assesses the causes and ramifications of mass incarceration in the U.S. in a discussion of his book Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration. He is joined in the conversation by the Library’s Anne Kniggendorf.
Brian Steed of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College continues the Hollywood vs. History series, examining the film industry’s role in shaping the nation’s response to, and support of, World War II. He looks in depth at The Best Years of Our Lives, the 1946 movie about three servicemen who struggle to adjust to life at home after returning from the war.