Organized crime formed part of the political, economic, and social fabric of Kansas City for much of the 20th century. The mob's power was never greater than in the three decades it was ruled by Nick Civella, Kansas City's longest-reigning mob boss. Mobsters in our Midst reveals the story of the rise and fall of Civella and his powerful crime family, as told by longtime Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Bill Ouseley. Concerted efforts by the FBI, local law enforcement, and Justice Department Strike Force prosecutors, along with the enactment of effective new laws and internal mob strife, led to unprecedented violence in the 1970s and 1980s and ultimately to the demise of the Civella mob rule. Ouseley will share never-before-published details of the crimes and investigations that brought down Civella and his cronies.

Gary Kremer, executive director of the State Historical Society of Missouri, will chronicle the life of renowned African American scientist and teacher George Washington Carver, beginning with a discussion of the political and social circumstances in Missouri at the time that Carver was born into slavery. George Washington Carver: A Biography follows Carver through his formal education to his decision to accept Booker T. Washington's offer to teach and do research at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. The focus is on Carver's career at Tuskegee and his major achievements, including his championing of crop rotation and the hundreds of products he created from peanuts, sweet potatoes, and other plants native to the South. Kremer portrays the famed scientist George Washington Carver as a brilliant, creative man, who nonetheless possessed very human peculiarities and frailties.

Like many Missouri slaves, Dred and Harriet Scott, a St. Louis couple, each sued for freedom in 1846 based on the time they had lived as slaves in free territory. When their cases were appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, attorneys combined the separate freedom suits into a single case under Dred's name, resulting in Harriet's role being largely lost to history. The well-known case of Dred Scott eventually made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, where, on March 6, 1857, Dred Scott and his family were denied their freedom and the country was pushed a step closer to the Civil War. Ruth Ann Hager, a genealogist at the Special Collections Department of the St. Louis County Library, will explore how the Scott family finally secured their freedom and what happened to Harriet and the couple's daughters, Eliza and Lizzie, after Dred's death in 1858.