Are you looking for a way to celebrate Juneteenth in Kentucky? A visit to the Walking Trail at 616 Clintonville Road, Paris, KY 40361, can introduce you and your children to the contribution of African Americans in Kentucky.  June 19, 1865 was the day that General Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3 which proclaimed the freedom of every enslaved person in the whole United States. It became known as Juneteenth and is now celebrated as a federal holiday. Granger is buried in Fernwood Cemetery in Henderson, Kentucky. General Gordon married Maria Letcher from Garrard County, Kentucky, so we can claim a Kentucky history connection to Juneteenth.  We celebrate the lives of 14 African Americans in the Eye-Spy Game on the Walking Trail. They are: Elisha Green, Effie Waller Smith, Peter Durrett, Emma C. Clement, James B. Johnson, Helen LaFrance, Albery A. Wilson, Nancy Green, Carl Brashear, Mary Britton, Rolla Blue, Martha Cross, Samuel Oldham, and Julia Chinn. Select a number. F...

On April 13, 1742 Handel's Messiah was performed for the first time. It happened in Dublin. This oratorio was criticized as blasphemous because it treated the life and teaching of Jesus Christ as theater. When it was performed at Westminster Abbey, however, the same work was called sacrilege because it was a theatrical work performed in a church. Sometimes you can't win. Handel eventually arranged to perform the Messiah as a fund-raiser for the London Foundling Hospital. This was well received and it became an annual event. The lyrics of the Messiah are lifted straight from the King James Bible .  Handel was born in Germany in 1685. In 1727, he became a naturalized British citizen. That same year he accepted a commission to compose a coronation anthem for King George II. Again Handel took inspiration from the Bible - this time from the coronation of Solomon. Nathan the prophet and Zadok the high priest officiated at Solomon's coronation. Hence Handel called his anthem Za...

  Arbor Day is Friday, April 28, 2023. We're opening the Walking Trail and Arboretum for first, second and third grade classes to come for a 40-minute outdoor STEAM adventure featuring trees. Your students will hear and read poems about trees. They will learn to identify the parts of a tree and count tree rings to figure out how old a tree was when it was cut down. The experience involves a half-mile walk on a gravel trail through a beautiful arboretum at 616 Clintonville Road in Paris, Kentucky. We are charging $2/person. Use this link to select when your group will come and to help us have enough tree cookies on hand. A spacious picnic area is available for your class to use if you want to bring brown-bag lunches. Some souvenirs: books, candy, and trading cards are for sale if your class brings spending money. Please use this link to register your class and to select the time you will come. 

Yesterday, February 6, 2023, was the Jewish festival Tu B'Shvat . It is the birthday of the trees. The date this festival is celebrated shifts from year to year. All Jewish feasts do because the Jewish calendar is lunar. The birthday of the trees it will always be in January or February, however. Why do the trees need a birthday? Because the ancient Jewish law forbade a person from eating from a fruit tree until it was five years old. So, all the trees have their birthdays on the same day.  What does that have to do with us at the Kentucky Faith & Public History Education Project in Paris, Kentucky? Our mission is to provide education around the Christian religion and its history, particularly in Kentucky. As one of the signs on our half-mile Walking Trail says, the first people who believed the Christian message were Jewish people living in Jerusalem in the first century of the Christian era. So, by honoring this Jewish festival, we recall the roots of the Christian faith. Bes...

Religion is lumped in with history, literature, languages and art as one of the humanities but we tend not to feel as comfortable teaching about religion as the other subjects. Teaching about religion does not promote any one particular faith. It introduces the fact that there are differences between people and their ideas and practices about God. Primary students can easily be introduced to the idea that there are different religions during social studies units about the community and its people. Different religions use different types of  buildings. Different religions can be identified by the way some adherents dress. When you are teaching about communities, say that people worship in different types of buildings. People who are Christians worship in churches or cathedrals. People who are Jewish worship in synagogues. People who are Muslim worship in mosques, and people who are Hindu or Buddhist worship in temples. Take pictures of any of these buildings in your school community...

     Living History is a term for an interpretive strategy used at museums like Colonial Williamsburg  or Conner Prairie . It is when visitors are ushered back to a specific place in the past that is peopled by costumed interpreters doing everyday tasks using authentic tools and materials or else very accurate reproduction artifacts. Often the visitors are encouraged to assist with the activities. Sometimes the interpreters have adopted a persona based on a real person. This approach uses theater methods and requires each character to have a very detailed understanding of the time and circumstances their person would have lived in. It takes research to locate the documents, oral history resources, and evidence from material culture from which each character is created. Then it takes a certain discipline to maintain the character's first-person perspective when visitors interact from their modern point of view. This introduces a fun tension that emphasizes the shifts ...

 Dear Teacher, It's nearly winter break. We here at the Kentucky Faith & Public History Education Project wish every Kentucky teacher a blessed holiday season. We want you to know that we value what you do and that we understand that your job is not about the paycheck. It's truly about the students. It takes commitment and sacrifice. We want to take this opportunity to thank you.  You more than deserve the recognition and the honor. Many of you keep a warm coat in the trunk of your car for when you have bus duty at the end of the day and the temperature has dropped 20 degrees since you left your house before it was light. You probably have spent several recent evenings preparing to delight your students with a holiday surprise before winter break. You routinely spend your own money to make sure your classroom has enough paper, pencils, crayons and other essential supplies so that every student can learn. Many have made it a personal mission to provide a safe environment fo...

There are four additional titles in the FKCC series of high-interest, low-ability chapter books: Great Idea: the Story of Harry Clark Karsner; Knocked Down: The Story of Carl Brashear; Too Bad: The Story of Peggy Taylor; and Not Fair: The Story of Mary Britton. The four original titles have new covers as well. You can find all eight books on Amazon here . The books are appropriate for the public school classroom library. They model the Kentucky State Curriculum Standards for Social Studies Inquiry Process They introduce famous Kentuckians  They reflect typical classroom problems: bullying, being a new kid, having a disability... They include an archival image from the Library of Congress Collection They have a glossary and a works cited page They are written at the 2nd to 4th grade reading level with as many words as possible limited to a single syllable They have four short chapters They are fictional accounts of a team of fourth grade students who must collaborate to create an ex...

The Kentucky Faith & Public History Education Project produces resources for teachers and others to use when speaking of the history of Christianity in Kentucky. One significant priority has been to discover and disseminate biographical information linking the faith of famous Kentuckians with their achievements. To set famous Kentuckians as role models, heroes and heroines without including their own recognition that faith, religion or spirituality was an essential catalyst for the courage, wisdom, and diligence they needed to attain their fame may not equip our students to emulate their processes. Show-casing aspirational role models for our students is good. However, to deny the students critical information about the specific sources for their role models' strength (faith) may set them up for future disappointments and disillusionments. The topic of faith may be a missing component in the scope and sequence of the character education we make available to our K-12 students. ...

 The Kentucky Faith and Public History Education Project exists to create and disseminate resources for use in public schools and elsewhere about Kentucky's Christian history. We started by articulating facts about Christianity using secular, objective and non-devotional language to introduce and explain what the Christian message is, how Christians practice their faith and what Christians believe. Interpretive text panels with that information, illustrated with historic images from the public domain like the Library of Congress Collection, are on display at the project's walking trail in Paris, Kentucky. Additional text panels contain information about the history of Christianity worldwide, in Kentucky and in Bourbon County. The walking trail also includes an eye-spy game that introduces thirty famous Kentucky Christians with short biographies spread out over seven sets of clues. Some of these individuals are also featured in our easy-reader chapter books. (Books 1-4 are avail...

  The Kentucky Faith and Public History Education Project provides and produces resources about Kentucky’s Christian history in terms appropriate for the K-12 public school classroom. Often this is best achieved by sharing the stories of people who attributed their successes to their faith. There is an index of famous Kentucky Christians on the project website [1] with links to external websites with more biographical information. Frequently the most difficult thing we do is to find original and verifiable documentation of their faith. Too often faith is neglected and viewed as marginal or irrelevant. Our project pulls the strand of faith forward. Carl Brashear served as consultant to the movie, Men of Honor , starring Cuba Gooding Jr. and Robert DeNiro that portrays his quest to become the Navy’s first African American Master Diver. It juxtaposes the cruel racism that Brashear endured in the pursuit of his dream with his determination and self-control. It is difficult to watch....

  The early nineteenth century camp-meeting revivals impacted how Americans understood the separation of church and state. This concept was a political innovation, added to the Constitution because of the insistence of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. The model for the First Amendment was the 1786 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom which became the legal definition of religious freedom in the United States. It reads:                 “We the General Assembly of Virginia do enact [Be it enacted by the General Assembly] that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that...

 The early nineteenth century camp meetings drew so many people that it was impossible for one or two preachers to meet the spiritual and practical demands for preaching, exhortation and ministry. While the location might be associated with a particular denomination (the Cane Ridge Meeting House was Presbyterian, for example), preachers and lay-ministers from every denomination in attendance were pressed into service. This cross-denominational cooperation and collaboration is one of the characteristics that made the revivals so contagious, in my opinion. Even women were exhorters. Of course, this was an unheard of practice in the days where men and women sat in different sections of a church and where women were not invited nor expected to preach to or to teach men. Women exhorters were protested but one preacher retorted to the critic this way, as recorded in A.P. Mead's 1860 history of the camp meeting revivals, Manna In The Wilderness: " You think women are proper teachers ...

  One of the social impacts of the early nineteenth century revival camp-meeting movement was to change the way Americans thought about childhood. Prior to 1800, according to Karen Calvert, “Childhood had no positive attributes of its own worthy of expression. A child was merely an adult in the making, and childhood, as a period of physical and spiritual vulnerability was a deficiency   to be overcome.” [1] By 1800, more than half (55.2%) of the people living on the Kentucky frontier were children under the age of 16. This compares to 49% for the rest of the new United States, according to Ted A. Smith. [2] So, many younger people would have been present at the camp meetings. When children began to respond spiritually, this was unprecedented and unusual. Children as young as five were recorded to have addressed adults at these camp meetings, standing on benches, tree branches and from the shoulders of adults. Their religious exhortations were taken seriously both by other ch...

  Over the next several weeks, this blog will feature posts about the early nineteenth century camp meetings such as the Cane Ridge Revival [1] in Bourbon County Kentucky which happened in August 1801. It was organized and promoted over several months as a Presbyterian celebration of Holy Communion. While Holy Communion remains a very important ordinance in every modern Christian denomination and church, it is usually embedded in a regular congregational meeting, taking no more than about 30 minutes. This was not the case with eighteenth and early nineteenth century Presbyterians. Consistent with the traditions brought to the United States by Scottish Presbyterians, Communion took at least three days. First the prospective participants were required to prove that they were spiritually qualified to receive the bread and wine that represented the body and blood of Jesus Christ. The next day was for the actual sacramental meal. The third day was given to praise and thanks to God for ...

  When world history teachers introduce the Christian religion to students, it is often as a cultural factor in the transition from the ancient era to the Enlightenment. Rarely do the textbooks present Christianity as a religion that, from the beginning, has had a global aspiration because of Jesus’ instruction to His disciples to go into all the world, teaching, making disciples and baptizing. Perhaps it is assumed that the students already understand this missional objective. Much of Western history, from the Crusades to the colonialization of the Americas and the exploration of Africa can be contextualized as an expansion and defense of Christianity. This has often included actions and dogmas that are inconsistent with the core tenets of the faith even though, in many cases, the words of the Bible have been extracted to strengthen the resolve of the religious activists. Andrew Walls wrote that “Christian history may be seen as a succession of cross-cultural movements” [1] sta...

  The Kentucky Faith and Public History Education project published the first four high-interest, easy-reader chapter books in its Famous Kentucky Christians Club (FKCC for short) Series in August 2020, making them available for sale on Amazon. They are examples of historical fiction written at a second through fourth grade reading level that are appropriate for elementary and middle school students. Our plan is to release the books in sets of four where one is about a white man, one about a black man, one about a white woman and one about a black woman – with Hispanic and other minority men and women included as we discover their stories. Each book treats the Christian religion factually, using secular, objective, and non-devotional language without minimizing the extent to which the famous Kentuckian valued, prioritized and represented that faith. Each enjoyable plot that follows the same pattern. There is a state competition for fourth grade students. Each book is about the ...

Women are often left under-acknowledged in the historical record. African American women are even less likely to be named. It is our commitment here at the Kentucky Faith & Public History Education Project to honor the contributions of past Kentucky Christians including men, women, whites, blacks, Native Americans, Hispanics, and others. It takes a lot of work to find documented evidence of their existence and of how they explained the importance of their faith to their lives and work. An example of the minimal mention given to Dinah Durrett in the written record is the subject of this blog. Peter Durrett organized the first two African American churches in Kentucky beginning in 1808. His was the second African American church in the United States, an oddity given that Kentucky is a southern state and that Durrett was enslaved. His nickname was Old Captain. He emigrated to Kentucky in 1781 with the Traveling Church, a pilgrimage of some 500 Baptists from Spottsylvania, Virgina....