Announcing Our 548th Meeting
Saturday, January 18,2020
The 25th Annual Frank Rankin Lecture

The Civil War: Kentucky’s Mercurial Path

Presented by Kent Masterson Brown 

We welcome back Kent Masterson Brown who will deliver the 25th Annual Frank Rankin Lecture. Kent was born in Lexington, Kentucky on February 5, 1949.  He is a 1971 graduate – and in 2014 named a distinguished graduate - of Centre College and received his juris doctor degree in 1974 from Washington and Lee University School of Law.  Kent has practiced law for forty-four years with offices in Lexington and Washington, DC.  Kent has published six books, all on the Civil War, including Cushing of Gettysburg: The Story of a Union Artillery Commander, Retreat from Gettysburg: Lee, Logistics and the Pennsylvania Campaign, and One of Morgan’s Men: The Memoirs of Lieutenant John M. Porter of the Ninth Kentucky Cavalry; they have been selections of the History Book Club and Military Book Club.  All of them have received rave reviews and numerous national awards.  He is currently writing George Gordon Meade and the Gettysburg Campaign, which will go to press in the summer of 2020.

Kent has also written, hosted, and produced eight award-winning documentary films for public and cable television, including: Bourbon and Kentucky: A History Distilled, Henry Clay and the Struggle for the Union, Unsung Hero: The Horse in the Civil War, Daniel Boone and the Opening of the American West, and “I Remember The Old Home Very Well:” The Lincolns in Kentucky. All Kent’s films have been widely broadcast throughout the United States, Canada, and overseas. Two of his films, Daniel Boone and The Lincolns in Kentucky, won the regional television ratings when they were premiered on Kentucky Educational Television. All have won Telly Awards; Unsung Hero was nominated for an Emmy Award.

A nationally known speaker and Civil War battlefield guide, Kent was the first chairman of the Gettysburg National Military Park Advisory Commission and the first chairman of the Perryville (Kentucky) Battlefield Commission, a seat he held for eleven years overseeing the expansion of the Perryville Battlefield.  He served on the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and is now a member of the Kentucky Film Commission.  He has also been a director of the Gettysburg Foundation.  Kent is now the President and Content Developer for the Witnessing History Education Foundation, Inc.  Kent lives in Lexington with his wife, Genevieve, and their three children, Annie Louise, Philip and Thomas.

The Civil War: Kentucky’s Mercurial Course

At the time of the secession crisis in the winter and spring of 1861, Kentucky had all the indicators of joining her sister slave States in seceding from the Union but did not.  Instead, Kentucky became, for all practical purposes, a Union State, even though 35,000 Kentuckians joined the Confederate armies.  By War’s end, Kentucky, as a State, believed it had embraced the wrong side, and, in the years after the War, became as ardently “Confederate” as its sister southern States.  It remains so all the way through the mid-twentieth century.  This is that story.