Upcoming Events

Add Our Events to Your Calendar

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.

Printing Indigenous Community – Summer Bookbinding Workshop

Date: July 19, 2025

Time: 10:30 am - 3:00 pm

Location: The Filson Historical Society, 1310 S. 3rd St. (In Person Only)

Reserve your spot today for the first in a series of events that explore the roles of printing and bookmaking in Native American communities. The Filson will host a hands-on bookbinding workshop featuring the work of Myaamia artist Megan Sekulich (Myaamia Center – Miami University). Participants will have the opportunity to craft hand-sewn pamphlets with letterpress printed covers, enclosing an original piece by Sekulich that draws inspiration from the Myaamia Kiilhswaakani – the Miami Lunar Calendar. Sekulich’s depiction of the lunar cycle emphasizes Indigenous ecological knowledge, interweaving Myaamia aesthetics and Myaamiaataweenki text. The workshop will be co-guided by local printer and bookbinder, Mark Alan Mattes of Hot Brown Press.

Separate workshops will be conducted in the morning (10:30 a.m.-noon) and afternoon (1:30-3:00 p.m.). Each workshop has a limited capacity of 12 participants. A material fee is included in the admission price. Reservations are required.

Megan Sekulich is a Myaamia artist. Her body of work incorporates woodcut relief, intaglio, collage, textile, mixed media, and traditional crafts.

Dr. Mark Alan Mattes is the founder of Hot Brown Press, a letterpress print shop and bindery in Louisville.

Explore Payne Hollow, the Homestead of Anna and Harlan Hubbard

Date: July 25, 2025

Time: 9:00 am - 1:00 pm

Location: Payne Hollow Base Camp, Milton, KY (In Person Only)

Registration Required

Nestled on the banks of the Ohio River, Payne Hollow offers a unique opportunity to reflect on themes of simplicity, creativity, and environmental stewardship. Together, we will walk the historic Payne Landing Road to the Hubbard home, then delve into the Hubbards’ writings and artwork while viewing the river.

Guests must provide their own transportation to Payne Hollow’s base camp near Milton, KY. Participants must be able to traverse difficult terrain, which includes a 500-ft elevation change during the 3/4-mile walk. Appropriate clothing and footwear for rough outdoor hiking is required. All participants must sign waivers affirming their physical capacity to undertake this strenuous outing.

Payne Hollow is largely in the state that Harlan and Anna Hubbard left it. While that is part of its appeal, participants should be aware that there are no modern amenities. Participants should bring—and be able to carry in and out—drinking water and appropriate food to maintain energy levels for the hike. Sun and insect protection are highly recommended.

Archeology/History Walking Tour at Oxmoor Farm

Date: August 18, 2025

Time: 9:30 am - 11:30 am

Location: Oxmoor Farm, 720 Oxmoor Ave., Louisville (In Person Only)

Registration required

This program is generously sponsored by Dinsmore.

Want to channel your inner historian and archeologist? Join us on a tour of the historic Oxmoor Farm estate and archeological dig site! Oxmoor’s curator, Shirley Harmon, will lead a historic tour of the Oxmoor house comprised of sections dating back to 1791, 1829 and 1928, and talk about the history of the people who lived and worked at Oxmoor Farm. Archeologist Lori Stahlgren will lead a tour of the excavation site, and participants will have the opportunity to participate in a special dig. The dig site is located inside the former enslaved dwellings and is part of an ongoing restoration project that will culminate with a future on-site exhibit about the life of the enslaved people that once lived at Oxmoor Farm.

Participants must be able to traverse uneven terrain, ascend/descend stairs, and are required to wear clothing and footwear suitable for outdoor walking. As a portion of this event is held outdoors, participants should expect to be exposed to high temperatures and humidity.

The James J. Holmberg Lecture Series – The Cherokees in War & Peace | A book discussion with David Narrett, Ph.D.

Date: August 19, 2025

Time: 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm

Location: The Filson Historical Society, 1310 S. 3rd St., Louisville (In Person and Zoom options available)

Registration required

Sponsored by the Society of Colonial Wars in the Commonwealth of Kentucky and the General Society of Colonial Wars.

For more than 150 years between their first encounters with the English in the 1670s and forced removal along the Trail of Tears, the Cherokees negotiated mounting pressures. At the dawn of the eighteenth century, the idea of unity among the widely dispersed Cherokees would scarcely have occurred to their leaders. Rich in detail and insight, and told through captivating personal stories, The Cherokees offers a portrait of the perseverance that built a nation. Amid an onslaught of struggle and change, the Cherokees became a people who survived against all odds.

Dr. David Narrett will participate in a thoughtful discussion with Filson leadership around his latest work and take our audience on the detailed and impactful journey of the Cherokee.

American Maccabee: Theodore Roosevelt and the Jews

Date: August 26, 2025

Time: 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm

Location: The Filson Historical Society, 1310 S. 3rd St., Louisville (In Person and Zoom options available)

Registration required

A scion of the Protestant elite, Theodore Roosevelt was an unlikely ally of the waves of impoverished Jewish newcomers who crowded the docks at Ellis Island. Yet from his earliest years he forged ties with Jews never before witnessed in a president. American Maccabee traces Roosevelt’s deep connection with the Jewish people at every step of his dazzling ascent. But it also reveals a man of contradictions whose checkered approach to Jewish issues was no less conflicted than the nation he led.

Drawing on new archival research to paint a richly nuanced portrait of an iconic figure, American Maccabee chronicles the complicated relationship between the leader of a youthful nation and the people of an ancient faith.

Andrew Porwancher is professor of history at Arizona State University. His books include The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton (Princeton) and The Devil Himself: A Tale of Honor, Insanity, and the Birth of Modern America.

Please note: In the July/August Calendar, this was mistakenly published with a Thursday date. It is on Tuesday, August 26. Please call the Filson with any questions.

The Gertrude Polk Brown Lecture Series – Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America

Date: September 25, 2025

Time: 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm

Location: The Kentucky Center - Bomhard Theater, 501 W. Main St., Louisville

Risen Author Pic_hr — Photo credit: Kate Milford

As relevant as it is comprehensive, Red Scare tells the story of McCarthyism and the Red Scare—based in part on newly declassified sources—by an award-winning writer of history and New York Times reporter Clay Risen.

The film Oppenheimer has awakened interest in this vital period of American history. Now, for the first time in a generation, Red Scare presents a narrative history of the anti-Communist witch hunt that gripped America in the decade following World War II. The cultural phenomenon, most often referred to as McCarthyism, was an outgrowth of the conflict between social conservatives and New Deal progressives, coupled with the terrifying onset of the Cold War. This defining moment in American history, unlike any that preceded it, was marked by an unprecedented degree of political hysteria. Drawing upon newly declassified documents, journalist Clay Risen recounts how politicians like Joseph McCarthy, with the help of an extended network of other government officials and organizations, systematically ruined thousands of lives in their deluded pursuit of alleged Communist conspiracies.

Clay Risen, a reporter and editor at The New York Times, is the author of The Crowded Hour, a New York Times Notable Book of 2019 and a finalist for the Gilder-Lehrman Prize in Military History.

The Gertrude Polk Brown Lecture Series – Cassius Marcellus Clay: The Life of an Antislavery Slaveholder and the Paradox of American Reform

Date: December 4, 2025

Time: 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm

Location: The Kentucky Center – Bomhard Theater, 501 West Main St., Louisville

Marshall_Anne_Cropped_Credit Megan Bean — Photo Credit: Megan Bean

The nineteenth-century Kentucky antislavery reformer Cassius Marcellus Clay is generally remembered as a knife-wielding rabble-rouser who both inspired and enraged his contemporaries. Clay brawled with opponents while stumping for state constitutional changes to curtail the slave trade. He famously deployed cannons to protect the office of the antislavery newspaper he founded in Lexington. Despite attempts on his life, he helped found the national Republican party and positioned himself as a staunch border state ally of Abraham Lincoln. During the Civil War, he served as US minister to Russia, working to ensure that European allies would not recognize the Confederacy. And yet he was a slave owner until the end of the Civil War. Though often misremembered as an abolitionist, Clay was like many Americans of his time: interested in a gradual end to the institution of slavery but largely on grounds that it limited whites’ ability to profit from free labor and the South’s opportunity for economic advancement. In the end, Clay’s political positions were far more about protecting members of his own class than advancing the cause of Black freedom.

This vivid and insightful biography reveals Cassius Clay as he was: colorful, yes, but in many ways typical of white Americans who disliked slavery in principle but remained comfortable accommodating it. Reconsidering Clay as emblematic rather than exceptional, Anne E. Marshall shows today’s readers why it took a violent war to finally abolish slavery and why African Americans’ demands for equality struggled to gain white support after the Civil War.

Anne E. Marshall is associate professor of history and executive director of the Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library at Mississippi State University.

Visit the Filson

The Filson will be closed to the Public on Friday, July 18th.

Open Monday through Friday, 9 am to 4:30 pm

The Filson is closed to the public the 3rd Friday of every month.

1310 S. 3rd St., Louisville, KY 40208
(502) 635-5083

Plan Your Visit to the Filson! To register or purchase tickets for our events, please visit our Events Page.

The Research Library is open Monday through Friday, 9 am to 4:30pm; we are closed on the third Friday of each month. Appointments are not required, but feel free to reserve a seat online – learn more here. We also provide remote research services; please complete our research request form online here.

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