Upcoming Events

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.  


The Filson Goes Back to the 80s Party

Date: February 23, 2024
Time: 6:30 pm - 9:30 pm
Location: The Filson Historical Society (In Person Only)
80s draft logo

It might be Hip to be Square, but you’d be a total Dork to miss this Rad party!

Join the Filson for a 1980s themed blast to the past.  You’ll have plenty of time to dance the Thriller or Pogo to your favorite music videos from big hair bands to cutting edge New Wave hits.  Photo ops with a DeLorean and 80s celebrities. Don’t miss the upstairs Food Court and Video Arcade.  Dust off your leather pants, pop that preppy collar on your Izod shirt, get out the hair spray and participate in a costume contest.

Pretend the Ball Is Named Jim Crow: The Story of Josh Gibson

Date: February 27, 2024
Time: 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Location: The Filson Historical Society (In Person and Virtual Options)
Book cover for Pretend the ball is named Jim Crow

A Reception sponsored by the University Press of Kentucky will be held from 5:00-5:55 pm, with the lecture following at 6:00 pm.

Joshua “Josh” Gibson (1911–1947) is a baseball legend—one of the greatest power hitters in the Negro Leagues, and in all of baseball history. At the height of his career, this trailblazing athlete suffered grueling physical ailments, lost his young wife who died giving birth to their twins, and endured years of Jim Crow–era segregation and discrimination—all the while breaking records on the ball field.

Dorian Hairston’s debut poetry collection explores the Black American experience through the lens of Gibson’s life and seventeen-year baseball career, which culminated in his posthumous election to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972. Hairston brilliantly reconstructs the personas of Gibson and others in his orbit whose encounters with white supremacy interweave with the inevitability of losing loved ones. By alternating between the perspectives of Gibson, members of his family, and contemporary Black baseball players, Hairston captures the complexity and the pain of living under the oppressive weight of grief and racial discrimination.

Emotive, prescient, and absorbing, these powerful poems address social change, culture, family, race, death, and oppression—while honoring and giving voice to Gibson and a voiceless generation of African Americans.

Dorian Hairston is a poet, scholar, and former University of Kentucky baseball player from Lexington, Kentucky. He is a member of the Affrilachian Poets and his work has appeared in Shale, Anthology of Appalachian Writers, and pluck!