Emily Bingham, a Louisville-native offers a deeply researched as well as a personal and incisive biography of one of America’s most iconic melodies. In this resonant history, we see the enduring ability to forget and deny the realities of slavery, and Bingham, by casting an unflinching eye on our cultural inheritance, leads us to the promise of a reckoning."

"How did a minstrel song about the slave trade become a beloved melody, a celebratory anthem, and an integral part of American folklore and culture? Acclaimed historian Emily Bingham’s new book, explores the compelling history of Stephen Foster’s 1853 “My Old Kentucky Home,” which tried to present slavery as carefree while also telling a wrenching story of a man sold to die in the sugarcane fields of the Deep South. The song—for years sung by white men in blackface entertaining white audiences—was a sensation and has been with us ever since.

For almost two centuries, its lyrics and meaning have been protested, altered, mythologized in thousands of performances—from Bing Crosby to Bugs Bunny to John Prine and Prissy in Gone with the Wind—and enshrined as the state song of Kentucky. Every year at the world’s most important horse race, the Kentucky Derby, “My Old Kentucky Home” is sung by tens of thousands of nostalgic fans, almost all of them unknowingly conjuring a mythic version of a brutal past.”

In 1808, Lexington, Kentucky, became home to the first professional theatre west of the Alleghenies, and as railroads expanded, the town became a convenient stop on “the road” for many of the great actors and actresses of the century that followed. Its theatres survived economic downturns, threats of censorship, outcries in the name of morality, crooked managers, epidemics, and the Civil War, but then came motion pictures, and Lexington’s fame as the “best one night stand” on the touring circuit faded into footnotes. Of course, there have been new venues and new actors in town, but Lexington’s glorious theatrical ghosts still hover in our history.

Mr. Dearinger will present images and anecdotes to chronicle the intrepid personalities, styles, fads, follies, snobberies, and glories of the Lexington stage in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

Benjamin Gratz (1792-1884), for whom Lexington’s oldest historic district is named, was the first, and for at least thirty years, the only Jewish resident of the city. His rapid integration into Lexington’s elite was a sign of the community’s religious tolerance, and for many decades he was involved in almost every aspect of the city’s civic life. What made his central role in local affairs possible was the wealth he earned as one of Lexington’s leading slaveowners. Intimate documents make it possible to show in detail how slave ownership pervaded every aspect of the Gratz family’s life. The story of Benjamin Gratz forces us to recognize that “the Athens of the West” whose memory is celebrated in Gratz Park was built on the backs of enslaved Black people.

“Patented: The Innovative Spirit of Garrett A. Morgan,” presented by Mr. Morgan’s granddaughter Sandra Morgan.

Born and raised in Paris, Kentucky, Mr. Morgan is one of the country’s greatest inventors and innovators, best known for creating the stoplight and porotype of the modern day gas mask. Additionally, he was dedicated to advancing the cause of racial equality.