Featured Speaker of the Kentucky Humanities Council’s Speakers Bureau.

Listen to a 30 minute interview on the KHC’s “Think Humanities” podcast.

Learn about booking through the Speakers Bureau.

Contact about availability.

See a complete list of presentations to groups of all ages and levels of familiarity with history.

Kentucky Humanities Council presentations include:

Ben and Helen Buckner: A Kentucky House Divided

Clark County sweethearts Ben Buckner and Helen Martin fought to keep their relationship together while supporting opposite sides during the Civil War. While Buckner led troops in the Union army, Martin hosted rebels in her parlor. Abraham Lincoln spoke of the United States as a “House Divided,” but this Kentucky couple managed to stand united. The fascinating personal history of Ben and Helen’s courtship and marriage helps us explore broader histories that ask new questions about slavery, secession, loyalty, family, and forgiveness in Civil War Kentucky. Together, Ben and Helen teach us what values and ideals Unionists and Confederates shared in Civil War Kentucky as well as those that pushed them apart.

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Refugees: Searching for an Untold Civil War Kentucky

A southern belle on a diplomatic adventure to combat rebel spies in Europe; a woman fleeing slavery and falsely convicted of murder in Louisville; a war widow whose cow was shot by enemy soldiers as she was milking it; a man who insists on his right to vote and calls into question the meaning of United States citizenship. These stories remind us that Civil War battles did not just happen on rolling hillsides under flying flags. All Kentuckians lived the  Civil War in their everyday struggles to survive, overcome, and understand this most critical time in United States history. In a global age of conflict and civil war, what new insights can these individuals provide us about America’s most studied historical event?