All library locations will be closed on Thursday, July 4th for Independence Day.
Posted on Wednesday, August 7, 2019 by Alyssa
Mark your calendars because the most prominent holiday of the year is quickly approaching. August 18 is National Bad Poetry Day!
Whether you’re reading or writing it, bad poetry is fun. Maybe it’s the pure schadenfreude of watching someone be bad at something. It makes us feel better about ourselves, especially when good poets put out bad poetry. The same poet who penned beautiful lines such as: Continue reading “National Bad Poetry Day”
Posted on Friday, July 19, 2019 by Liz
This is the second post celebrating the 50th anniversary of a big event to happen in 1969. I’m sharing some books and DVDs that focus on the Apollo 11 moon landing that happened on July 20, 1969. There are even more library materials on this topic than the few I’ve listed below. Check out this list for more suggestions!
On July 16, 1969 the Apollo 11 spacecraft, manned by Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin, launched from the Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex. Apollo 11 landed on the moon four days later July 20, 1969. This was the first mission to land men on the moon and the first return of samples from another planetary body. Continue reading “50th Anniversary: Apollo 11 Moon Landing”
Posted on Friday, June 28, 2019 by Liz
There were several big events that occurred in 1969. I will be doing a series of posts that focus on these important events and share some library materials about these events for library patrons to check out!
The Stonewall Riots occurred on June 28, 1969. New York City Police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar, in Greenwich Village. This raid sparked push back from the gay community of New York City and beyond. The Stonewall Riots help strengthen the Gay Liberation Front and lead to the formation of the Gay Activists Alliance. It also lead to the first Gay Pride March that occurred one year later on June 28, 1970.
“The Stonewall Reader: Edited by the New York Public Library” by New York Public Library, Edmund White (Foreword)
June 28, 2019 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, which is considered the most significant event in the gay liberation movement, and the catalyst for the modern fight for LGBTQ rights in the United States. Drawing from the New York Public Library’s archives, “The Stonewall Reader” is a collection of first accounts, diaries, periodic literature, and articles from LGBTQ magazines and newspapers that documented both the years leading up to and the years following the riots. Most importantly the anthology spotlights both iconic activists who were pivotal in the movement, such as Sylvia Rivera, co-founder of Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (STAR), as well as forgotten figures like Ernestine Eckstein, one of the few out, African American, lesbian activists in the 1960s. The anthology focuses on the events of 1969, the five years before, and the five years after. Continue reading “50th Anniversary: Stonewall Riots”
Posted on Wednesday, June 19, 2019 by DBRL_Katie
It’s common knowledge that during the American Civil War President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, legally freeing millions of African Americans who were enslaved in the Confederate states, on January 1, 1863. But the story did not simply end then; there was still much to accomplish around the nation in fully abolishing the 400-year-old system of slavery, one which long predated nationhood in some of the earliest colonies. To start, border states like Missouri that permitted slaveholding while remaining in the Union during the war were not subject to Lincoln’s executive order. It was up to those individual states to commit to emancipation, and the Missouri state legislature secured the abolition of slavery the year after. Another challenge was spreading word of the Emancipation Proclamation to areas in rebellion, particularly remote parts of the “Old Southwest” where Union armies had not campaigned.
Two months after the Confederacy surrendered at the Appomattox Courthouse, hundreds of thousands of Black Texans labored in chattel status until the arrival of General Gordon Granger in Galveston, Texas, who on June 19, 1865 publicized the reality of emancipation. The ensuing jubilee set the precedent for annual Juneteenth celebrations, which often involve parades and rodeos, storytelling, pageants and barbecue cookouts complete with red pies and red drinks (see chapter 13). According to the Texas State Historical Association, “The first broader celebrations of Juneteenth were used as political rallies and to teach freed [male] African Americans about their voting rights.” Continue reading “Celebrating Juneteenth”
Posted on Wednesday, June 5, 2019 by JessB
June 7th is National Donut Day and what better way to celebrate than with your favorite frosted, jellied, powdered or glazed confection! One of my favorite memories as a kid was our weekly grocery shopping ritual. Every Saturday, my mom, sister and I would head to the grocery store. After the groceries were bought and the car was loaded up, we would walk next door to the stand-alone bakery and pick out a dozen donuts to bring back to the house. It was a small, family-owned bakery full of glass cases filled with delicious donuts, perfect pastries, and cakes for all occasions. I have always loved baking and seeing those perfect donuts all lined up in neat rows always delighted me.
If you are a donut enthusiast like myself, there are many ways that you 
can show your appreciation on National Donut Day. Perhaps you want to dust off your baking skills and make your own donuts. If you are looking for inspiration, there are a number of books you can check out to explore new donut recipes. “Donuts” by Elinor Klivans is a good place to start. This book covers the basics with recipes for glazed, jelly-filled, and sprinkled donuts. Or you could also try “Doughnuts: 90 Simple and Delicious Recipes to Make at Home” by Lara Ferroni which includes a variety of donut recipes like rainbow cake, maple-bacon bars, red velvet, and classics like old-fashioned sour cream. Continue reading “National Donut Day!”
Posted on Friday, May 24, 2019 by DBRL_Katie
Coming home after a long day of work at the public library, many of us find ourselves still surrounded by stacks on stacks of books that comprise our prized personal collections. (While you’d think we library workers needn’t own much given our livelihoods depend on an institution of sharing, few of us could boast of such self-restraint.) Mine had grown increasingly unwieldy through my college years, so naturally I caught the Dewey Decimal bug soon after starting my job here, feeling compelled to inventory and rearrange my own mismatch shelves (and milk crates). While sorting the nonfiction into subject areas, I wondered whether my coworkers brought the same organizational rigor to their home libraries as when on duty, so I decided to ask. The short answer is a resounding “yes,” but each has developed an idiosyncratic system for keeping it all straight, or at least off the floor.
Between their responses and those of public figures in books like “My Ideal Bookshelf,” Alberto Manguel’s “The Library at Night” and Jacques Bonnet’s “Phantoms on the Bookshelves,” I’ve seen some enviable displays and accrued techniques galore. Some are on Rory Gilmore‘s level: books on the shelves, books in the dresser drawers, books stowed under the bed. Others have adopted systems analogous to the Marie Kondō method* of painstakingly housing only the most gratifying. Some proudly have no scheme at all. Regardless, these libraries can reveal a lot about their owners; they not only represent our interests but also show our habits in negotiating space, how we assign value and how those values intersect with our conspicuous designs. For Kathryn Schulz writing in The New Yorker, a photograph of her father’s “Stack” exudes the parts of him “that normally defy a camera” like his “exuberant, expansive mind” and “the comic, necessary, generous-hearted compromises of my parents’ marriage.” Leah Price puts it concisely in the introduction to “Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books”: “To expose a bookshelf is to compose a self.” Continue reading “Personal Libraries: Taking Our Work Home With Us”
Posted on Friday, May 17, 2019 by JessB
If you enjoy some of the wonderful trails that Columbia has to offer, the letters “MKT” might sound a bit familiar. Long before it was a recreational trail, the MKT was actually a railroad line that spanned the states of Missouri, Kansas, and Texas – hence the name MKT. On Wednesday, May 22 at 7:00 pm, the Columbia Public Library will host John Wilke from the Mid-Missouri Rail Fans organization for a program about the Columbia branch of the MKT Railroad and how it connected Mid-Missouri to the rest of the country.
The MKT railroad, also known as the “Katy”, started in 1865 in Kansas and was a valuable link between the Midwest and Texas. It is known for being the first railroad to pass through Indian Territory, what is now the state of Oklahoma. The line actually began as the southern branch of the Union Pacific Railway and was intended to run from Junction City, Kansas to New Orleans, Louisiana. However, those ambitions were never quite realized and the MKT line ran from St. Louis, Missouri to San Antonio, Texas at it’s peak with stops in Kansas City, Topeka, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, and Galveston, among other
towns. Continue reading “The History of the MKT Railroad”
Posted on Wednesday, May 8, 2019 by Alyssa
Life can be a lot sometimes. Simply being a human comes with so many responsibilities, stressors, and heartache that it can be hard to process. There are many tried and true habits for maintaining good mental health such as exercising, meditating, and getting enough sleep, but there is one that often goes overlooked.
Time and time again, behavioral health experts have reported that journaling can help people cope with anxiety, stress, and depression. What makes journaling so effective? It gives you a chance to process your emotions and put your thoughts and feelings on paper. Like Dumbledore’s Pensieve, you get to pull the troubling thoughts out of your head and set them somewhere else. You get to be creative without fear of scrutiny. Continue reading “The Therapeutic Effects of Journaling”
Posted on Friday, April 26, 2019 by Chris
In honor of Earth Month,* please allow me to pay tribute to the humble bicycle. There are many reasons to love bikes. Here is a far-from-exhaustive list of reasons to love bikes.
Posted on Monday, April 15, 2019 by DBRL_Katie
For several years now, folks from the Alzheimer’s Association have partnered with us at DBRL to host informational sessions on Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. With these events coming up again, I began looking—and I didn’t need to look far— for narratives of those experiencing Alzheimer’s, whether first hand or in a loved one. Case in point, while progressing through “The Sopranos“ as quickly as I can stomach, my favorite character has developed the symptoms between disorientation, muddled memories and straying far from home. With this content all around, I’ve realized how commonly writers draw on their own experiences to take up this heavy subject. Alzheimer’s looms large over our society, especially as we are living longer in what Ai-jen Poo calls an “elder boom.” It can bring some of our worst fears of impermanence to head, so we may find solace in stories that help us share the load and reckon with this social reality.
When authors write Alzheimer’s and dementia narratives, they often confront core questions of identity, transition, and loss. In his New Yorker essay, A Place Beyond Words, author Stefan Merrill Block asks,
“How do you locate the personhood in someone who is, for neurobiological reasons, no longer the person you knew? Is there a way to be true to medical fact and still find something that is transcendently human?”