The Kentucky Faith & Public History Education Project is committed to discovering, honoring, and telling factual stories about people who lived and worked in this state who also gave a public account of their Christian faith. Researching the stories of women and minorities from the past is frequently more difficult than researching what happened to men from the majority culture. Many times their perspectives are missing from the standard historical narratives. Often, written accounts of their lives were neither created nor have they been preserved. Because of past gender, ethnic and racial biases, what is written is about them often disregards their own beliefs and opinions. To discover their stories takes tenacity and creativity as well as an ability to read between the lines. Take Martha Cross, for example. She, her husband, Alexander, and their seven-year-old son, James, left Hopkinsville, Kentucky, for Liberia in 1853. They were sent from the Ninth Street Christian Ch...

History, literature, philosophy, the arts and religion are fields within the humanities. According to the National Humanities Center , “the humanities help us understand and interpret the human experience, as individuals and societies” [1] . The National Humanities Center, founded in the mid-1970’s is a collaborative sponsored by some 38 major universities including Princeton, Harvard and Yale that studies and prepares humanities resources for teachers. A section of their website is called Divining America: Religion in American History [2] .  This section contains essays written by humanities scholars about religion in America, organized by century. The essays all follow the same format. Beginning with a topic like “the First Great Awakening” or “Native American Religion in Early North America” or “The American Jewish Experience”, for examples, each essay begins by explaining what major scholars have written about the topic. Usually several viewpoints are presented to illustrate th...