Big Read

U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, whose acclaimed An American Sunrise is the focus of the Library’s Big Read 2022, reads and discusses her work in the featured event of the six-week, community-wide initiative.  

The Library continues a month-long series of film screenings in conjunction with Big Read 2022 with the thought-provoking Night Raiders (2021, NR, 101 min.). Set in a postwar North America in 2043, the dystopian sci-fi drama is a parable about the experiences of the con...

The Kansas City Indian Center and Haskell Indian Nations University join in launching the Library’s community-wide Big Read 2022, a six-week initiative revolving around U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s acclaimed poetry collection An American...

The Library opens a month-long series of film screenings in conjunction with Big Read 2022 with Smoke Signals (1998, PG-13, 89 min.), the first feature-length movie written, directed, co-produced, and performed by Native Americans. Adapted by screenwriter Sherman Alexie...

Efforts to marginalize Native Americans and their culture could not diminish their transformational impact on popular music, from the Delta blues and jazz to hip-hop. Native artists such as electric guitar pioneer Link Wray, whose instrumental hit “Rumble” was banned from radio, and Jimi Hendrix, who was part Cherok...

Former ambassador David F. Lambertson, who served in Saigon in the mid-1960s as a member of the American embassy’s political section and later was part of the U.S. delegation to the Paris peace talks, discusses the end of the war in Vietnam—what it meant then and what it should mean now.

As the Vietnam War escalated in the 1960s, Hollywood was struggling financially and the longtime studio system was collapsing. Into the vacuum stepped a cadre of young filmmakers concerned and affected by the unpopular war. Against a backdrop of political and cultural unrest, a new Hollywood emerged. Filmm...

The war experience in Vietnam varied greatly, depending on when and where you served. A panel of military veterans, convened by the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, reflects back on the conflict from individual perspectives.

During the Vietnam conflict, battles on the homefront went beyond anti-war protests. Activists gathered in support of many cultural movements: civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, rights for students and workers, and protections for the environment. UMKC history professors Rebecca Davis and...

For many U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, music was the connection between battlefront and homefront and helped them cope with the complexities of the war. And it helped many of those who came home to heal. Author Doug Bradley talks about the popular tunes of the era and plays clips from songs that had significant resonanc...