Kansas City’s Public Library: Empowering the Community for 150 Years

Kansas City’s Public Library: Empowering the Community for 150 Years PDF Author: Jason Roe
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
From the humble beginnings of a single bookcase in 1873, the Kansas City Public Library grew into a bedrock cultural institution with an ambitious mission of bolstering the people’s welfare, inspiring lifelong learning, and empowering citizens through knowledge. Across one and a half centuries, Kansas Citians ranging from Walt Disney to entrepreneur Ewing Kauffman, civil rights activist Alvin Sykes, Mayor Kay Barnes, and Congressman Emanuel Cleaver II, have sought out the Kansas City Public Library’s resources for professional inspiration, personal respite, and community uplift. Kansas City’s public library is an indispensable agent of community empowerment. On its 150th anniversary, its continuity of purpose—and its place at the heart of the city’s civic culture—is clearer than ever. Ever since its formative years in a wild western setting, and spanning decades of urbanization and social upheaval, the spectrum of the Library’s history is inseparable from that of Kansas City. Generations of patrons have sought out its resources for self-improvement, community uplift, or as a safe space to exist without obligation or payment. This meticulously researched book explores the Library’s record of achievement, the challenges it has weathered, the diverse backgrounds of its supporters, and, in some cases, its historical shortcomings. Today the Library enriches its community with innovative programming (recognized with a National Medal for Museum and Library Service from the Institute of Museum and Library Services), cutting-edge technology, and a commitment to serve all members of the community.

Kansas City’s Public Library: Empowering the Community for 150 Years

Kansas City’s Public Library: Empowering the Community for 150 Years PDF Author: Jason Roe
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 205

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the humble beginnings of a single bookcase in 1873, the Kansas City Public Library grew into a bedrock cultural institution with an ambitious mission of bolstering the people’s welfare, inspiring lifelong learning, and empowering citizens through knowledge. Across one and a half centuries, Kansas Citians ranging from Walt Disney to entrepreneur Ewing Kauffman, civil rights activist Alvin Sykes, Mayor Kay Barnes, and Congressman Emanuel Cleaver II, have sought out the Kansas City Public Library’s resources for professional inspiration, personal respite, and community uplift. Kansas City’s public library is an indispensable agent of community empowerment. On its 150th anniversary, its continuity of purpose—and its place at the heart of the city’s civic culture—is clearer than ever. Ever since its formative years in a wild western setting, and spanning decades of urbanization and social upheaval, the spectrum of the Library’s history is inseparable from that of Kansas City. Generations of patrons have sought out its resources for self-improvement, community uplift, or as a safe space to exist without obligation or payment. This meticulously researched book explores the Library’s record of achievement, the challenges it has weathered, the diverse backgrounds of its supporters, and, in some cases, its historical shortcomings. Today the Library enriches its community with innovative programming (recognized with a National Medal for Museum and Library Service from the Institute of Museum and Library Services), cutting-edge technology, and a commitment to serve all members of the community.

BiblioTech

BiblioTech PDF Author: John Palfrey
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465040608
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Libraries today are more important than ever. More than just book repositories, libraries can become bulwarks against some of the most crucial challenges of our age: unequal access to education, jobs, and information. In BiblioTech, educator and technology expert John Palfrey argues that anyone seeking to participate in the 21st century needs to understand how to find and use the vast stores of information available online. And libraries, which play a crucial role in making these skills and information available, are at risk. In order to survive our rapidly modernizing world and dwindling government funding, libraries must make the transition to a digital future as soon as possible -- by digitizing print material and ensuring that born-digital material is publicly available online. Not all of these changes will be easy for libraries to implement. But as Palfrey boldly argues, these modifications are vital if we hope to save libraries and, through them, the American democratic ideal.

Kansas City's Public Library: Empowering the Community for 150 Years

Kansas City's Public Library: Empowering the Community for 150 Years PDF Author: Jason Roe
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781524888091
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
From the humble beginnings of a single bookcase in 1873, the Kansas City Public Library grew into a bedrock cultural institution with an ambitious mission of bolstering the people's welfare, inspiring lifelong learning, and empowering citizens through knowledge. Across one and a half centuries, Kansas Citians ranging from Walt Disney to entrepreneur Ewing Kauffman, civil rights activist Alvin Sykes, Mayor Kay Barnes, and Congressman Emanual Cleaver II, have sought out the Kansas City Public Library's resources for professional inspiration, personal respite, and community uplift. Kansas City's public library is an indispensable agent of community empowerment. On its 150th anniversary, its continuity of purpose--and its place at the heart of the city's civic culture--is clearer than ever. Ever since its formative years in a wild western setting, and spanning decades of urbanization and social upheaval, the spectrum of the Library's history is inseparable from that of Kansas City. Generations of patrons have sought out its resources for self-improvement, community uplift, or as a safe space to exist without obligation or payment. This meticulously researched book explores the Library's record of achievement, the challenges it has weathered, the diverse backgrounds of its supporters, and, in some cases, its historical shortcomings. Today the Library enriches its community with innovative programming (recognized with a National Medal for Museum and Library Service from the Institute of Museum and Library Services), cutting-edge technology, and a commitment to serve all members of the community.

How to Stitch an American Dream

How to Stitch an American Dream PDF Author: Jenny Doan
Publisher: Harper Horizon
ISBN: 078525305X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Faith, family, hard work, and second chances are at the core of every great American story, and Jenny Doan’s story is just that. In her new memoir, How to Stitch an American Dream, readers will discover the behind-the-scenes success story of the Missouri Star Quilt Company and Jenny’s remarkable journey to overcome hardship, claim the abundance of family, and ignite the power of giving—all while revitalizing a small town along the way. Over the last decade, the Doan family business, the Missouri Star Quilt Company in tiny Hamilton, Missouri, has grown from Jenny’s corner shop--with one quilting machine and two bolts of fabric for sale in the back--to become the largest supplier of pre-cut quilting fabric in the headquarters of Jenny’s world-famous YouTube tutorial videos. Jenny is now giving her fans, the business world, and moms of all ages (and grandmas too!) what they’ve been asking for: the full story of her journey, from her humble beginnings as a homeschooling mom, to founding MSQC in her fifties, through the remarkable success and inspiration she’s so well-known for today. In this book, you’ll learn: How she and her beloved husband, Ron, raised seven children on a shoestring budget— and had fun doing it; How, after a string of bad luck, the family made a prayer-based decision to leave California behind and start over again in rural Missouri, even though they had no place to live, no jobs lined up, and no idea how they were going to make it; How Jenny, Ron and their children worked side-by-side to patch together a family home out of a crumbling shell of a farmhouse; And how their faith, hard work, and generosity not only carried them through the hard times, but led directly to the success of the Missouri Star Quilt Company. How to Stitch an American Dream will make you laugh, cry, say “bless your heart.”

The Age of the Vikings

The Age of the Vikings PDF Author: Anders Winroth
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400851904
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
A major reassessment of the vikings and their legacy The Vikings maintain their grip on our imagination, but their image is too often distorted by myth. It is true that they pillaged, looted, and enslaved. But they also settled peacefully and traveled far from their homelands in swift and sturdy ships to explore. The Age of the Vikings tells the full story of this exciting period in history. Drawing on a wealth of written, visual, and archaeological evidence, Anders Winroth captures the innovation and pure daring of the Vikings without glossing over their destructive heritage. He not only explains the Viking attacks, but also looks at Viking endeavors in commerce, politics, discovery, and colonization, and reveals how Viking arts, literature, and religious thought evolved in ways unequaled in the rest of Europe. The Age of the Vikings sheds new light on the complex society, culture, and legacy of these legendary seafarers.

The Day the World Stops Shopping

The Day the World Stops Shopping PDF Author: J.B. MacKinnon
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062856049
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Consuming less is our best strategy for saving the planet—but can we do it? In this thoughtful and surprisingly optimistic book, journalist J. B. MacKinnon investigates how we may achieve a world without shopping. We can’t stop shopping. And yet we must. This is the consumer dilemma. The economy says we must always consume more: even the slightest drop in spending leads to widespread unemployment, bankruptcy, and home foreclosure. The planet says we consume too much: in America, we burn the earth’s resources at a rate five times faster than it can regenerate. And despite efforts to “green” our consumption—by recycling, increasing energy efficiency, or using solar power—we have yet to see a decline in global carbon emissions. Addressing this paradox head-on, acclaimed journalist J. B. MacKinnon asks, What would really happen if we simply stopped shopping? Is there a way to reduce our consumption to earth-saving levels without triggering economic collapse? At first this question took him around the world, seeking answers from America’s big-box stores to the hunter-gatherer cultures of Namibia to communities in Ecuador that consume at an exactly sustainable rate. Then the thought experiment came shockingly true: the coronavirus brought shopping to a halt, and MacKinnon’s ideas were tested in real time. Drawing from experts in fields ranging from climate change to economics, MacKinnon investigates how living with less would change our planet, our society, and ourselves. Along the way, he reveals just how much we stand to gain: An investment in our physical and emotional wellness. The pleasure of caring for our possessions. Closer relationships with our natural world and one another. Imaginative and inspiring, The Day the World Stops Shopping will embolden you to envision another way.

Wide-Open Town

Wide-Open Town PDF Author: Diane Mutti Burke
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700627065
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Kansas City is often seen as a mild-mannered metropolis in the heart of flyover country. But a closer look tells a different story, one with roots in the city’s complicated and colorful past. The decades between World Wars I and II were a time of intense political, social, and economic change—for Kansas City, as for the nation as a whole. In exploring this city at the literal and cultural crossroads of America, Wide-Open Town maps the myriad ways in which Kansas City reflected and helped shape the narrative of a nation undergoing an epochal transformation. During the interwar period, political boss Tom Pendergast reigned, and Kansas City was said to be “wide open.” Prohibition was rarely enforced, the mob was ascendant, and urban vice was rampant. But in a community divided by the hard lines of race and class, this “openness” also allowed many of the city’s residents to challenge conventional social boundaries—and it is this intersection and disruption of cultural norms that interests the authors of Wide-Open Town. Writing from a variety of disciplines and viewpoints, the contributors take up topics ranging from the 1928 Republican National Convention to organizing the garment industry, from the stockyards to health care, drag shows, Thomas Hart Benton, and, of course, jazz. Their essays bring to light the diverse histories of the city—among, for instance, Mexican immigrants, African Americans, the working class, and the LGBT community before the advent of “LGBT.” Wide-Open Town captures the defining moments of a society rocked by World War I, the mass migration of people of color into cities, the entrance of women into the labor force and politics, Prohibition, economic collapse, and a revolution in social mores. Revealing how these changes influenced Kansas City—and how the city responded—this volume helps us understand nothing less than how citizens of the age adapted to the rise of modern America.

Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War PDF Author: Howard W. French
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631495836
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
Revealing the central yet intentionally obliterated role of Africa in the creation of modernity, Born in Blackness vitally reframes our understanding of world history. Traditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a place of primacy to European history. Some credit the fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it established between West and East; others the accidental unearthing of the “New World.” Still others point to the development of the scientific method, or the spread of Judeo-Christian beliefs; and so on, ad infinitum. The history of Africa, by contrast, has long been relegated to the remote outskirts of our global story. What if, instead, we put Africa and Africans at the very center of our thinking about the origins of modernity? In a sweeping narrative spanning more than six centuries, Howard W. French does just that, for Born in Blackness vitally reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe’s dehumanizing engagement with the “dark” continent. In fact, French reveals, the first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not—as we are so often told, even today—Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge a trade in gold with legendarily rich Black societies sequestered away in the heart of West Africa. Creating a historical narrative that begins with the commencement of commercial relations between Portugal and Africa in the fifteenth century and ends with the onset of World War II, Born in Blackness interweaves precise historical detail with poignant, personal reportage. In so doing, it dramatically retrieves the lives of major African historical figures, from the unimaginably rich medieval emperors who traded with the Near East and beyond, to the Kongo sovereigns who heroically battled seventeenth-century European powers, to the ex-slaves who liberated Haitians from bondage and profoundly altered the course of American history. While French cogently demonstrates the centrality of Africa to the rise of the modern world, Born in Blackness becomes, at the same time, a far more significant narrative, one that reveals a long-concealed history of trivialization and, more often, elision in depictions of African history throughout the last five hundred years. As French shows, the achievements of sovereign African nations and their now-far-flung peoples have time and again been etiolated and deliberately erased from modern history. As the West ascended, their stories—siloed and piecemeal—were swept into secluded corners, thus setting the stage for the hagiographic “rise of the West” theories that have endured to this day. “Capacious and compelling” (Laurent Dubois), Born in Blackness is epic history on the grand scale. In the lofty tradition of bold, revisionist narratives, it reframes the story of gold and tobacco, sugar and cotton—and of the greatest “commodity” of them all, the twelve million people who were brought in chains from Africa to the “New World,” whose reclaimed lives shed a harsh light on our present world.

Wild Bill Donovan

Wild Bill Donovan PDF Author: Douglas Waller
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416576207
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
"Entertaining history...Donovan was a combination of bold innovator and imprudent rule bender, which made him not only a remarkable wartime leader but also an extraordinary figure in American history" (The New York Times Book Review). He was one of America's most exciting and secretive generals--the man Franklin Roosevelt made his top spy in World War II. A mythic figure whose legacy is still intensely debated, "Wild Bill" Donovan was director of the Office of Strategic Services (the country's first national intelligence agency) and the father of today's CIA. Donovan introduced the nation to the dark arts of covert warfare on a scale it had never seen before. Now, veteran journalist Douglas Waller has mined government and private archives throughout the United States and England, drawn on thousands of pages of recently declassified documents, and interviewed scores of Donovan's relatives, friends, and associates to produce a riveting biography of one of the most powerful men in modern espionage. William Joseph Donovan's life was packed with personal drama. The son of poor Irish Catholic parents, he married into Protestant wealth and fought heroically in World War I, where he earned the nickname "Wild Bill" for his intense leadership and the Medal of Honor for his heroism. After the war he made millions as a Republican lawyer on Wall Street until FDR, a Democrat, tapped him to be his strategic intelligence chief. A charismatic leader, Donovan was revered by his secret agents. Yet at times he was reckless--risking his life unnecessarily in war zones, engaging in extramarital affairs that became fodder for his political enemies--and he endured heartbreaking tragedy when family members died at young ages. Wild Bill Donovan reads like an action-packed spy thriller, with stories of daring young men and women in his OSS sneaking behind enemy lines for sabotage, breaking into Washington embassies to steal secrets, plotting to topple Adolf Hitler, and suffering brutal torture or death when they were captured by the Gestapo. It is also a tale of political intrigue, of infighting at the highest levels of government, of powerful men pitted against one another. Donovan fought enemies at home as often as the Axis abroad. Generals in the Pentagon plotted against him. J. Edgar Hoover had FBI agents dig up dirt on him. Donovan stole secrets from the Soviets before the dawn of the Cold War and had intense battles with Winston Churchill and British spy chiefs over foreign turf. Separating fact from fiction, Waller investigates the successes and the occasional spectacular failures of Donovan's intelligence career. It makes for a gripping and revealing portrait of this most controversial spymaster.

Know Your Price

Know Your Price PDF Author: Andre M. Perry
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780815737278
Category : POLITICAL SCIENCE
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Changing perceptions about the worth of African Americans and their communities Know Your Price establishes new means of determining value of Black communities. The deliberate devaluation of Blacks and their communities, stemming from America's centuries-old history of slavery, racism, and other state-sanctioned policies like redlining have tangible, far-reaching, and negative economic and social impacts. Rejecting policies shaped by flawed perspectives, the book gives fresh insights on these impacts and provides a new value paradigm to limit them. In the book, noted educator, journalist, and scholar Andre Perry takes readers on a guided tour of five Black-majority cities whose assets and strengths are undervalued. Perry begins the tour in his hometown of Wilkinsburg, a small city east of Pittsburgh that, unlike its much larger neighbor, is struggling and failing to attract new jobs and industry. Perry gives an overview of Black-majority cities and spotlights four where he has a deep connection to--Detroit, New Orleans, Birmingham and Washington, D.C.--providing an intimate look at the assets residents should demand greater value from. Know Your Price demonstrates through rigorous research and thorough analysis the worth of Black people's intrinsic strengths, real property, and traditional institutions. All of these assets are means of empowerment, as Perry argues for shifting away from simplified notions of equality and moving towards maximizing equity.