Frankfort Heritage Lecture Series

In his 2024 book Benefactors of Posterity, Daniel Gifford explored the motivations and activities of early history advocates and institution-builders who established the Filson Historical Society in Louisville in 1884. But as that generation passed on after the turn of the century, who would be the leaders to pick up the mantle of archiving, museum work, research, and publication in the state? The Filson found a new generation of leadership in President Rogers Clark Ballard Thruston and Director of Publications Otto Rothert, who solidified and began to professionalize the history professions in Kentucky, alongside contemporaries at the Kentucky Historical Society and the growing state university system. This presentation will trace those efforts, evaluate their success, and reflect on what they mean for Kentuckians today.
 
Dr. Patrick Lewis is the incoming President & CEO of the Filson Historical Society. He came to the Filson in 2019 and served as the Director of Collections & Research and co-editor of Ohio Valley History journal. A Trigg County native, he graduated from Transylvania University and holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Kentucky, where he taught for two years. Before coming to the Filson, he worked for the National Park Service and the Kentucky Historical Society. He has won grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the James Graham Brown Foundation. Lewis is author of For Slavery and Union: Benjamin Buckner and Kentucky Loyalties in the Civil War (University Press of Kentucky, 2015) and co-editor of Playing At War: Identity and Memory in Civil War Video Games (Louisiana State University Press, Fall 2024).

Kentucky was the site of one of the most important slave markets in the Upper South. Enslaved Kentuckians played an important role in developing the Commonwealth. Join Dr. Vanessa M. Holden as she explores this vital role and the ins and outs of how slavery bolstered Kentucky's economy.

Dr. Vanessa M. Holden is Associate Professor of History and Director of African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is also the director of the Central Kentucky Slavery Initiative. Dr. Holden’s book, Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner’s Community (University of Illinois Press), is the winner of the 2021 James Broussard Best First Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR). Her writing has been published in Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, Perspectives on History, Process: A Blog for American History, and The Rumpus. Dr. Holden serves as a faculty adviser on several public history and digital humanities projects including Freedom on the Move and The Digital Access Project (DAP). Her current research focuses on slavery and enslaved people in Kentucky.