The Little Lectures are informal programs featuring speakers on a variety of topics.

In-person programs are presented on Sunday afternoons at 2:00 p.m. at our headquarters located at 1310 Kanawha Boulevard, East, Charleston, in the parlor of MacFarland-Hubbard House. The series is one of the many ways the Humanities Council shares our historic property with the community. Seating is limited (thus “Little” Lectures) and reservations are suggested. Admission is $10 per person and includes refreshments after the lecture. When the weather is nice refreshments are enjoyed outdoors under our pergola.

The Little Lectures are presented once each month. Previous Little Lecturers include historian John Alexander Williams, biographer Jean Edward Smith, Monticello horticulturalist Peter Hatch, novelist Denise Giardina, playwright Billy Edd Wheeler, and West Virginia Poet Laureate Marc Harshman.

Call 304.346.8500 or email warmack@wvhumanities.org for further information.

All public spaces at the MacFarland-Hubbard House are accessible. When making your reservations, please advise us of any accessibility accommodations that you may need. Contact 304.346.8500 in advance.

From 2020 onward, videos of all West Virginia Humanities Council Little Lectures are available on YouTube and Facebook. 

Ilene Evans
Rose Agnes Rolls Cousins: Black Dreams in Blue Skies

Throughout a life of dignity and perseverance, aviation pioneer Rose Agnes Rolls Cousins (1920-2006) fought for civil rights and equal treatment. Born into segregation in Fairmont, she enrolled at West Virginia State College at age 16. The young firebrand soon became the first Black woman admitted as a solo pilot into State’s new Civilian Pilot Training Program—and eventually tried out for the combat training course that birthed the Tuskegee Airmen. On March 26, 2023, scholar and performer Ilene Evans shared a brief look into the life of Agnes Cousins. Evans has portrayed Harriet Tubman for the Council’s History Alive! program for two decades, has taught at Fairmont State University, and is the artistic director of theater arts organization Voices From The Earth.

Scott MacKenzie
The Fifth Border State: Slavery, Emancipation, and the Formation of West Virginia

In The Fifth Border State, out now from West Virginia University Press, author Scott MacKenzie proposes a new interpretation of West Virginia statehood, one which counters some earlier histories' tendency to minimize support for slavery as a factor in the state’s founding. Employing previously unused sources and reexamining existing ones, MacKenzie argues that West Virginia experienced the Civil War in the same ways as the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware.

Mary Beth Brown
Creating a Path towards Equal Education: The Role of Border States in Desegregation

The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s often monopolizes popular memory of the era, crowding out earlier generations of Black activism. Prior efforts, however, laid the foundation for those hard-won successes. This Little Lecture focused on 1940s desegregation battles at college campuses in the “border states” of Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri—early struggles whose mixed results eventually led to Brown v. Board and accelerated the end of Jim Crow. Mary Beth Brown is a 20^th Century U.S. historian and the rare books librarian at the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming. She is a graduate of Marshall University and a native of Barboursville.

Steven Cody Straley
A Union State’s Confederate Idol: Stonewall Jackson, Confederate Monuments, and the Lost Cause in West Virginia

West Virginia is commonly viewed as a bastion of Union support during the Civil War that broke away from Virginia following its secession. Yet today the Mountain State landscape has its share of Confederate monuments, including many dedicated to Stonewall Jackson. Straley’s lecture highlights how the Lost Cause movement enjoyed considerable success in West Virginia throughout the 20th century. Lost Cause supporters carved out a space for the state in Confederate memory and succeeded in recasting Clarksburg native Stonewall Jackson as a model West Virginian. Steven Cody Straley is the National Register Coordinator at the West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office. He is a graduate of Marshall University, a native of Wayne County, and author of A Constant Reminder to All: Stonewall Jackson, the Lost Cause, and the Making of a Civil War Idol from 35th Star Publishing.