Although most people are more familiar with New Orleans' Mardi Gras and Brazil's Carnival, Germany has its own extravagant regional celebration known as Fasching, and on February 15, Kathlyn Hoffman will deliver a virtual presentation on this fascinating street party in Fascinating Fasching, a German American Heritage Center program offered in partnership with the Dank Haus.

Presented by Kevin Braafladt, the Army Sustainment Command Deputy Historian at the Rock Island Arsenal and the Army Sustainment Command History Office, the February 10 program Unrestricted Submarine Warfare & the Zimmermann Note serves as the latest virtual offering in the Davenport and Rock Island Public Libraries' series exploring the Quad Cities' and Rock Island Arsenal's historical ties to the first World War.

One of the most influential and revered figures in German history will be the focus of a virtual January 31 program when the German American Heritage Center hosts Hildegard von Bingen: Power Woman of Medieval Times, with presenters Wolf and Linnea Koch speaking on the Benedictine abbess, writer, and composer whom Pope Bvenedict XVI named a Doctor of the Church for “her holiness of life and the originality of her teaching.”

On January 25, in a program hosted by the Davenport Public Library, Jonathan Turner – local author and current writer for WVIK and QuadCities.com – will explore our area's recent and long-ago pasts as highlighted in his 2016 book A Brief History of Bucktown: Davenport's Infamous District Transformed. And that adjective “infamous” will be the juicy subject of much of Turner's presentation, given that the event's title Davenport's Bucktown in 1903: “Worst Town in America.”