Today, The East Bank Jefferson Library will celebrate two new book releases, and Zeitgeist will screen Cameron Crowe’s new rockumentary, but there was a time when Upton Sinclair was born (1878), when the first gasoline-powered car debuted in Springfield, MA (1891) when the first Cannes Film Festival was held (1946), and when Jim Croce died in a plane crash in Louisiana at the age of 30 (1973). Now back to the future:

The people of New Orleans are not shy about their opinions. Ask about food, or music, or politics, and there will be some tallkin'. But, sometimes, we're also listenin'. In our bookstores, museums, theaters, cinemas, universities, and, of course, our bars, great names lecture, workshop, curate, and debate every day. Welcome to the Speakeasy. The weekly roundup that lets you in on who’s lecturing, speaking, signing, screening, appearing, Q&A-ing, and workshopping all over town, so you can have your culture and eat it too. The week's highlights include a photographer and a sex psychologist.

July 6th, when Richard III was crowned King of England (1483), when the dollar was chosen as the official monetary unit for the United States (1785), when the first Republican Party Convention was held, in Jackson, Michigan (1854), when Jefferson Airplane formed (1965), and when Garrison Keillor’s ‘A Prairie Home Companion’ debuted live from St. Paul, MN (1974); it’s when Frida Kahlo (1907), George W. Bush (1946), Sylvester Stallone (1946), and 50 Cent (1975) were born, and when Fats Navarro (1950) and Roy Rogers (1998) died. So we ask what RR himself once wanted to know: “What's a butterfly garden without butterflies?” Perhaps this:

May 31, when the New Orleans Mint closed (1861), when John Harvey Kellogg patented "flaked cereal" (1894), the first NAACP conference (1909), the release of the first jazz record, Dark Town Strutters Ball (1917), when the Supreme Court ordered school integration "with all deliberate speed" (1955), when the Saints sold for $70,204,000 (1985), when Walt Whitman (1819) and Clint Eastwood (1930) were born, and when WWII icon Rosie Will Monroe, aka Rosie the Riveter, died (1997). Quite the laudable list, to say the least…lest us not let down: