Upcoming Events

Upcoming Events

Please see below for details and descriptions of upcoming events at the Filson.  All event times are in EST or EDT depending on the season.  Click here to register and pay for programs, tickets are required. Filson members will need to log in to access the member pricing for events.  Many of our past events can be viewed on the Filson YouTube Channel.  If you have any issues with registering via our ticketing solution please call (502) 635-5083.

Recent Filson events have regularly been reaching our capacity limits.  If members or non-members wish to attend an event please register beforehand.  We cannot guarantee a space for walk ups on the day of the lecture.  

Lafayette and the Farewell Tour: Odyssey of an American Icon

Date: April 4, 2024
Time: 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Location: Filson Historical Society (In-Person and Virtual Options)
Book Cover: Lafayette in America translated by Alan R. Hoffman.

This program is offered in partnership with The American Friends of Lafayette.

General Lafayette, born the Marquis de Lafayette in Auvergne, France, was truly an American idol in the 19th century. The proof is that 80 counties, cities, and towns were named after him as well as streets and roads everywhere. In this program, the translator of Lafayette in America in 1824 and 1825, a first-hand account of Lafayette’s Farewell Tour of America, will describe the full extent of his reputation and explore its origins. Lafayette’s extraordinary reputation was based on his military record in the Revolution, his friendship with Washington, his continued support of American interests, his story-book life and, perhaps most importantly, his Farewell Tour of America when he visited all 24 states and Washington City as the last surviving major general of the Continental Army. Lafayette’s visits to places associated with the venue of the talk are discussed to illustrate the grand reception that the American people gave him on his Farewell Tour.

Alan R. Hoffman obtained his BA in history from Yale where he studied under Professor Edmund Morgan, before earning a JD at Harvard Law School. He practiced law in Boston for 50 years. An avid reader of early American history, he “discovered” Lafayette in 2002 and spent two years – 2003 to 2005 – translating Auguste Levasseur’s Lafayette in America in 1824 and 1825, the first-hand account of Lafayette’s Farewell Tour of America written by his private secretary. This translation was published in 2006 and is in its third printing.

Jazz at the Filson

Date: April 7, 2024
Time: 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Location: Filson Historical Society (In-Person Only)
Mike Hyman playing drums.

Cost: $30 for members; $35 for potential members.

Join us Sunday, April 7 for a reunion concert with the Louisville Jazz Quartet All Stars! Created in the 90s by vibraphonist Dick Sisto, the Quartet played together at numerous jazz venues and were supported by enthusiastic jazz lovers. The group, featuring Tim Whalen on tenor sax, Tyrone Wheeler on bass, and Mike Hyman on drums, has not performed together in recent years and have played with noted jazz musicians such as David Sanborn, Richard Groove Holmes, Gary Burton, Fred Hersch, Stan Getz, David ‘Fathead’ Newman, Jimmy Rainey, Jack Macduff, and Joe Morello.

The reunion concert will feature the Great Standards and Jazz Standards from Falling in Love, the recent Steeplechase release of Dick Sisto. The repertoire will be a Jazz Feast and is not to be missed. Tickets for this event include light refreshments.

The Gertrude Polk Brown Lecture Series – Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II

Date: April 10, 2024
Time: 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Location: The Kentucky Center - Bomhard Theater, 501 W. Main St. (In-Person and Virtual Options)
Book Cover for Road to Surrender

Thank you to our sponsors: Dace Brown Stubbs, Marshall Farrer, Dace Polk Brown, Laura Lee Brown, Garvin Deters, Polk Deters, Laura Lee Gastis, Garvin Brown IV, and Campbell Brown. Members – Use code FILSON for complimentary tickets.

Tickets for this event must be purchased for both members and potential members through the Kentucky Performing Arts.

At 9:20 a.m. on the morning of May 30, General Groves receives a message to report to the office of the secretary of war “at once.” Stimson is waiting for him. He wants to know: has Groves selected the targets yet?

So begins this suspenseful, impeccably researched history that draws on new access to diaries to tell the story of three men who were intimately involved with America’s decision to drop the atomic bomb—and Japan’s decision to surrender. They are Henry Stimson, the American Secretary of War, who had overall responsibility for decisions about the atom bomb; Gen. Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, head of strategic bombing in the Pacific, who supervised the planes that dropped the bombs; and Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, the only one in Emperor Hirohito’s Supreme War Council who believed even before the bombs were dropped that Japan should surrender.

Henry Stimson had served in the administrations of five presidents, but as the U.S. nuclear program progressed, he found himself tasked with the unimaginable decision of determining whether to deploy the bomb. The new president, Harry S. Truman, thus far a peripheral figure in the momentous decision, accepted Stimson’s recommendation to drop the bomb. Army Air Force Commander Gen. Spaatz ordered the planes to take off. Like Stimson, Spaatz agonized over the command even as he recognized it would end the war. After the bombs were dropped, Foreign Minister Togo was finally able to convince the emperor to surrender.

To bring these critical events to vivid life, bestselling author Evan Thomas draws on the diaries of Stimson, Togo and Spaatz, contemplating the immense weight of their historic decision. In Road to Surrender, an immersive, surprising, moving account, Thomas lays out the behind-the-scenes thoughts, feelings, motivations, and decision-making of three people who changed history.

Evan Thomas is the author of eleven books: The Wise Men (with Walter Isaacson), The Man to See, The Very Best Men, Robert Kennedy, John Paul Jones, Sea of Thunder, The War Lovers, Ike’s Bluff, Being Nixon, First, and Road to SurrenderJohn Paul Jones, Sea of Thunder, Being Nixon, and First were New York Times bestsellers. Thomas was a writer, correspondent, and editor for thirty-three years at Time and Newsweek, including ten years (1986–96) as Washington bureau chief at Newsweek, where, at the time of his retirement in 2010, he was editor at large. He wrote more than one hundred cover stories and in 1999 won a National Magazine Award. He wrote Newsweek’s fifty-thousand-word election specials in 1996, 2000, 2004 (winner of a National Magazine Award), and 2008. He has appeared on many TV and radio talk shows, including Meet the Press and The Colbert Report, and has been a guest on PBS’s Charlie Rose more than forty times. The author of dozens of book reviews for The New York Times and The Washington Post, Thomas has taught writing and journalism at Harvard and Princeton, where, from 2007 to 2014, he was Ferris Professor of Journalism.

Oscie Thomas met her husband Evan at the University of Virginia law school, where they were classmates. In 1977, she joined Donovan Leisure, a litigation firm, in New York and Washington DC, before moving to AT&T, retiring as a Federal Government Affairs Vice President in 2000. Since then she has worked with Evan on his books as an editor and researcher.

Lonnie & Twyla Money: 50 Years of Kentucky Appalachian Folk Art

Date: April 16, 2024
Time: 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Location: Filson Historical Society (In-Person and Virtual Options)
Book cover of Lonnie & Twyla Money.

Lonnie & Twyla Money: 50 Years of Kentucky Appalachian Folk Art is the story of two iconic Kentucky artists who have not only been making highly regarded folk art pieces for nearly 50 years, but who have helped to shape this unique Appalachian art form.

Karen Abney grew up in the Ohio River Valley and has since traveled extensively, led by a natural curiosity and desire to seek out beautiful things. Kentucky has been her adopted home for nearly 40 years—familiar because of her Appalachian heritage, and enjoyed for its natural beauty.

Karen has been a designer since creating her first logo at age eight. An early love of letters led her to a career in Graphic Design, which evolved into work in Marketing, Environmental Graphic Design, Wayfinding and Signage Design, and Digital User Experience Design. She has won numerous awards for her work in each category.

An accomplished painter, fiber artist, and photographer, she has exhibited at several galleries across the region. She enjoys spending time hiking, kayaking, and traveling with her sons, Kyle and Alex Huninghake.

Bus Tour: Northwest & Indigenous Revolution Tour

Start date: April 18, 2024
End date: April 20, 2024
All-day event
Location: Bus Tour (In-Person Only)
Poster for the Filson Bus Tour of Northwest and Indigenous Revolution.

The tour will be visiting sites that require lots of walking and some stairs, please take this under consideration before purchasing tickets.

When George Rogers Clark struck north from the Falls of the Ohio in 1778, he plunged head-first into a century of Native and European diplomacy, trade, exchange, and settlement. Touring the intersection of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys, we connect Kentucky to ancient Cahokia, Parisian palaces, Great Plains fur camps, and Havana barrios. At no time until the present was our region as linguistically, spiritually, and culturally diverse as it was on the eve of American Independence. Visit colonial Ft. de Chartres, Ste. Genevieve, St. Charles, Cahokia, and Vincennes and meet local experts, architectural historians, artisans, and curators who keep the memory of this global crossroads alive.

The price of the trip includes transportation, admission to all museums and historical sites, two dinners with guest speakers, and two lunches. Participants are responsible for covering the costs of overnight accommodations at special group rate hotels and one lunch (totaling approximately $300).

An Evening with Rick Bass: “With Every Great Breath – New and Selected Essays, 1995-2023”

Date: April 18, 2024
Time: 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Location: Reception at 5pm, Lecture begins at 6pm at Filson Historical Society (In-Person Only)
Image of Rick Bass.

This lecture is made possible by the generous support of Nana Lampton and presented in collaboration with the Filson Historical Society.

A reception will be held before the lecture beginning at 5 PM.  The lecture will start at 6 PM.

For acclaimed writer and environmental activist Rick Bass, it can be wearying to dwell relentlessly upon the broken, fragmented, the dead and the dying, and the doomed-to-extinction. Activism is a necessary part of the environmental movement, but so is the time-honored celebration of the beauty that inspires us.

Spanning his storied career, these new and selected essays attempt to take a brief step to the side, away from lamentation and prescription, and to inhabit, as deeply as possible, the greater depths of beauty in-the-moment. With Every Great Breath ranges from the extremely local—a long-form essay about the community affected by the largest Superfund site in U.S. history, in Libby, Montana—to the far-flung: the Galapagos, Namibia, and Alaska. Throughout, Bass offers a portrait of our planet that is always alert to its wonders, even in the face of environmental crisis.

Rick Bass is the author of more than thirty books. He is a winner of the Story Prize, the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, a PEN/Nelson Algren Award Special Citation for fiction, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Under the Greenwood Tree: A Celebration of Kentucky Shakespeare

Date: April 25, 2024
Time: 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Location: Filson Historical Society (In-Person and Virtual Options)
Book cover of under the greenwood tree. Dark blue background with tree branches and leaves in the foreground.

This program is associated with the newly opened Filson exhibit, Kentucky Progress: Establishing the Kentucky State Parks, which will be open for 50 minutes prior to the program.

In the summer of 1960, director C. Douglas Ramey took his Carriage House Players theater company down the street from their Old Louisville venue to Central Park, where the actors performed scenes from the Shakespeare classic Much Ado about Nothing. Buoyed by the enthusiastic audience response, Ramey’s company returned to the park the next year for the first full season of the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival. More than sixty years later, Kentucky Shakespeare is now the oldest free, non-ticketed Shakespeare in the Park festival in the country. To commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the festival, in spring 2020 Kentucky Shakespeare cooperated with students in the University of Louisville’s Department of History to record twenty entertaining and enlightening oral interviews with longtime members of the company. In Under the Greenwood Tree, author Tracy K’Meyer captures the history of Kentucky Shakespeare in a series of carefully selected and edited transcripts of these interviews. In these pages, past and present cast and crew share their memories of the company’s history, performances in the park, and the positive impact of its many outreach programs, from its inception in the 1960s, to its slump in the early 2000s, and on to its recent renaissance. An illuminating record of the collaborative artistry that brings Shakespeare’s works to life, Under the Greenwood Tree offers readers a peek behind the curtain at the group’s steadfast stewardship of the most important literature in the English language.

Tracy K’Meyer is professor of US history at the University of Louisville, where she has served as codirector of the Oral History Center. She is the author of “To Live Peaceably Together”: The American Friends Service Committee’s Campaign for Open Housing and Civil Rights in the Gateway to the South: Louisville, Kentucky 1945–1980.

The Kentucky Oaks: 150 Years of Running for the Lilies

Date: April 30, 2024
Time: 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Location: Filson Historical Society (In-Person and Virtual Options)
Book cover the Kentucky Oaks 150 years of racing for the Lillies by Avalyn Hunter.

No Thoroughbred race in the state of Kentucky holds a more hallowed place in the national and international consciousness than the Kentucky Derby. Its fame is richly deserved, yet there are other equally important and historic races whose significance deserves a larger share of the spotlight—none more so than the Derby’s sister race, the Kentucky Oaks.

Inaugurated on May 19, 1875—just two days after the first Kentucky Derby—and run annually at Churchill Downs since then, the Kentucky Oaks is America’s most prestigious race for three-year-old fillies and the second-oldest continuously run horse race in North America. Always cherished by horsemen as a test for the future mothers of the Thoroughbred, the Oaks has in recent years become a major charity and fashion gala in addition to its significance as a sporting event. Yet, although multiple books have been published about the Kentucky Derby, popular and academic historians alike have largely overlooked the Oaks.

In The Kentucky Oaks: 150 Years of Running for the Lilies, author Avalyn Hunter sets out to recover the history of one of the most watched and highly attended events in Thoroughbred racing. Beginning with Meriweather Lewis Clark Jr.’s creation of a race designed to parallel England’s historic Oaks Stakes, Hunter traces the evolution of the Kentucky Oaks through the stories of the men, women, and fillies that have made the Kentucky Oaks a symbol for women’s growing participation in the sport at all levels.

Avalyn Hunter is a nationally recognized authority on Thoroughbred pedigrees and racing history whose work has appeared in the Blood-Horse, Thoroughbred Times, Owner-Breeder International, MarketWatch, New York Breeder, and Louisiana Horse. She is the author of Dream Derby: The Myth and Legend of Black Gold, American Classic Pedigrees 1914–2002, The Kingmaker: How Northern Dancer Founded a Racing Dynasty, and Gold Rush: How Mr. Prospector Became Racing’s Billion-Dollar Sire.

Anatomy of a Duel: Secession, Civil War, and the Evolution of Kentucky Violence

Date: May 14, 2024
Time: 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Location: The Filson Historical Society (In Person and Virtual Options)
Book cover for "Anatomy of a Duel: Secession, Civil War, and the Evolution of Kentucky Violence" by Stuart. W. Sanders.

When the popular musical Hamilton showcased the celebrated duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, it reminded twenty-first-century Americans that some honor-bound citizens once used negotiated, formal fights as a way to settle differences. During the Civil War, two prominent Kentuckians—one a Union colonel and the other a pro-Confederate civilian—continued this legacy by dueling. At a time when thousands of soldiers were slaughtering one another on battlefields, Colonel Leonidas Metcalfe and William T. Casto transformed the bank of the Ohio River into their own personal battleground. On May 8, 1862, these two men, both of whom were steeped in Southern honor culture, fought a formal duel with rifles at sixty yards. And, as in the fight between Hamilton and Burr, only one man walked away.

Anatomy of a Duel: Secession, Civil War, and the Evolution of Kentucky Violence examines why white male Kentuckians engaged in the “honor culture” of duels and provides fascinating narratives that trace the lives of duelists. Stuart W. Sanders explores why, during a time when Americans were killing one another in open, brutal warfare, Casto and Metcalfe engaged in the process of negotiating and fighting a duel. In deconstructing the event, Sanders details why these distinguished Kentuckians found themselves on the dueling ground during the nation’s bloodiest conflict, how society and the Civil War pushed them to fight, why duels continued to be fought in Kentucky even after this violent confrontation, and how Kentuckians applied violence after the Civil War. Anatomy of a Duel is a comprehensive and compelling look at how the secession crisis sparked the Casto-Metcalfe duel—a confrontation that impacted the evolution of violence in Kentucky.

Stuart W. Sanders is the Director of Research and Publications for the Kentucky Historical Society and is the former executive director of the Perryville Battlefield Preservation Association. He is the author of five books, including Perryville Under Fire: The Aftermath of Kentucky’s Largest Civil War Battle, The Battle of Mill Springs, Kentucky, Maney’s Confederate Brigade at the Battle of Perryville, Murder on the Ohio Belle, and Anatomy of a Duel: Secession, Civil War, and the Evolution of Kentucky Violence.

Filson140: A Heritage Jubilee

Date: May 18, 2024
Time: 10:00 am - 1:00 pm
Location: Filson Historical Society (In-Person Only)

Please join us for a family-friendly celebration in Old Louisville as The Filson Historical Society commemorates its 140th anniversary! Bring the family for a day of exciting activities, engaging exhibits, and fascinating tales from the past. Enjoy live music from The Louisville Leopards and Appalatin, Kona Ice, story time with StageOne, vintage fire truck rides, bubbles, balloon animals, face painting, photo oppor­tunities, and fun giveaways. The historic Ferguson Mansion and Filson exhibits will be open for guided tours. The festival will also include booths featuring some of our community partners who are celebrating milestone anniversaries, such as the Kentucky Derby Museum, Cave Hill Cemetery, the Belle of Louisville, the Louisville Slugger Museum, the Division Street School, Kentucky State Parks, Stock Yards Bank & Trust, and more! We are excited to hold this celebration in collabora­tion with Springfest (10:00am–7:00 pm) for an extended weekend of Old Louisville festivities.