Signature Events
Searching the Psyche Through Cinema
The annual Searching the Psyche Through Cinema series returns with psychological studies of films helmed by female directors. Leading off: a screening and discussion of Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (2017; R), the acclaimed coming-of-age story of a California high school senior (Saoirse Ronan) and her turbulent relationship with her loving but strong-willed mother.
William I. Hitchcock
University of Virginia historian William I. Hitchcock takes stock of Dwight Eisenhower’s far-reaching legacy as president in a discussion of his book The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s. It launches a series of events coinciding with the new Library exhibit Eisenhower’s Middle Road.
Daniel Reynolds
There’s a certain uneasiness about former concentration camps, ghettos, and other sites associated with the Holocaust being draws for tourists. But Grinnell College scholar Daniel Reynolds points to a valuable upside: Public interest has spurred officials to ensure what’s said and exhibited about the Nazis’ atrocities and Jewish suffering is accurate.
Benjamin Todd Wills
Kansas City artist Ben Wills details his outreach to prisoners and how it has affected his approach to his work. The presentation coincides with the Library exhibit Airplanes, which features a collection of expressive and revealing paper airplanes that inmates have sent to Wills over the years.
Searching the Psyche Through Cinema
This annual screening-and-discussion series continues in February with more psychological studies of films helmed by female directors.
Kansas City’s Equity Actors' Readers' Theatre
The Piano Lesson endures as one of August Wilson’s most eloquent and powerful plays, an account of a Depression-era black family at odds over an heirloom piano. Should family members improve their economic future by selling it? Or keep it, honoring a slavery-stained past?
David W. Mills
Winston Churchill gave credit where he and many others felt it was due just before V-E Day in May 1945, saluting U.S. Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall as “the true organizer of victory” in World War II. Indeed, no other general had more influence on the war’s outcome.
Tyehimba Jess won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Olio, which incorporates poems, songs, historical facts, interviews, and fiction to celebrate the lives and works of African American musicians, artists and orators who predated the Harlem Renaissance.
