Did the first woman photographer assigned to the White House use this camera to shoot President Truman? Then, did families of the Confederate South use a child’s doll to smuggle medicine past the Northern blockade? And, what does this 15th century map, with a mix of French, English and Spanish labels, tell us about how Europe colonized Florida?
History Detectives
Watch Tuesday, August 30, 2011 at 7pm.
Join KCPT and the National World War I Museum Friday, September 23 from 5:30 to 7:30 pm for Doughboys and Bootleggers: Exploring Prohibition in Post-WWI Kansas City.
See a sneak preview of Ken Burns’ and Lynn Novick’s latest documentary film series Prohibition, which debuts on KCPT in October. Then explore how the Great War impacted the Eighteenth Amendment and what Kansas City was like during Prohibition. You may also toast the juice joints of yore with a special cocktail before the screening by the mixologists of the Rieger Hotel and learn how to make a “Pendergast” – a drink as powerful as the political boss it is named after.
This free event will be held at the WWI Museum’s J.C. Nichols Auditorium.
RSVPs required; RSVP online or call 816.784.1475
Co-sponsored by the Rieger Hotel and Kansas City Bartenders Alliance.
In this episode, the images and the words on this poster suggest a battle is brewing: a clenched fist, police described as “pigs.” Who made this poster and why? Then, was this woodcarving of a mouth and chin once part of the Andrew Jackson figurehead affixed to the bow of the USS Constitution? And, how does this basket connect us to a woman congress honored as a heroine of the Modoc Indian Wars?
History Detectives
Watch Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 7pm.
Uniquely human abilities – to think in symbols; recombine those symbols into infinite meanings; invent a technology to disseminate the message; ponder the past; speculate about the future; imagine the unknown; build cities; compose music – constitute the “human spark.” In this three-part series, host Alan Alda searches for the origin and nature of this spark.
In the caves of the Dordogne region of France, host Alan Alda witnesses the spectacular paintings and carvings that date back some 30,000 years, artwork that archeologists once thought to be the first record of people with minds like ours. When this art was created, Europe had already been peopled for hundreds of thousands of years by Neanderthals. Alda discovers, from visits to sites where Neanderthals once lived, that they were tenacious and resourceful, but they produced no art and employed a stone tool technology that changed little over millennia. The people who painted the caves, our ancestors, were strikingly different, possessed of the “human spark,” capable not only of art but of innovative technology and symbolic communication. Alda asks: Where and when did the human spark first ignite? In these caves, as archeologists have long believed? Or at a much earlier time – and on another continent?
Watch Monday, August 15, 2011 at 9pm.
