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20 years ago, three-quarters of the houses on Muhammad Ali Blvd. between 24th and 26th streets were vacant or abandoned shells. Now there are only a few that remain uninhabited. Artists, musicians, retired librarians, and other hard-working creative and resourceful individuals have poured their time, energy, and passion into preserving the rich legacy of these historic homes on Muhammad Ali Blvd. On this walking tour you will meet several of the homeowners and hear firsthand their stories and the challenges along the way in saving their buildings. Historian Tom Owen will be on hand to share how the neighborhood has evolved over the past 155 years. You will be able to enter the mansion discussed in the Filson’s May 21st program, and view other houses on the block including the Bourgard School of Music, which is currently being restored, and the Samuel Plato House.

This program is produced in partnership with the Jewish Heritage Fund.

At the end of World War II, many thousands of Jewish Holocaust survivors immigrated to the United States from Europe in search of a new beginning. Most settled in major metropolitan areas, usually in predominantly Jewish communities, where proximity to coreligionists offered a measure of cultural and social support. However, some survivors settled in smaller cities and rural areas throughout the country, including in Kentucky, where they encountered an entirely different set of circumstances. Although much scholarship has been devoted to Holocaust survivors living in major cities, little has been written about them in the context of their experiences elsewhere in America.

This Is Home Now: Kentucky's Holocaust Survivors Speak presents the accounts of Jewish survivors who resettled outside of the usual major metropolitan areas. Using excerpts from oral history interviews and documentary portrait photography, author Arwen Donahue and photographer Rebecca Gayle Howell tell the fascinating stories of nine of these survivors in a unique work of history and contemporary art. The book focuses on the survivors' lives after their liberation from Nazi concentration camps, illuminating their reasons for settling in Kentucky, their initial reactions to American culture, and their reflections on integrating into rural American life.

Arwen Donahue has served as program coordinator in the department of oral history at the United States Holocaust Museum and managed its Post-Holocaust Interview Project. She is the author of Landings: A Crooked Creek Farm Year. 

Rebecca Gayle Howell is a writer, translator, and editor. She is the author of two award-winning novels in verse, American Purgatory and Render / An Apocalypse.

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.

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 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).