Frankfort Heritage Lecture Series: Lessons from “The Great Dissenter”

John Marshall Harlan was a rising political star in Kentucky amid the ferment of the Civil War. He played a key role in keeping Kentucky loyal to the union and used his personal prestige to raise and lead an 800-man regiment. In 1877, he was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he became "the Great Dissenter." He stood up against his colleagues when they took away the hard-won rights of Black people and deprived Congress and the states of the power to fight against income inequality in the Gilded Age. Today, he is among the most admired legal figures across the political spectrum. How did he get the law right when so many of his colleagues got it wrong?
Peter S. Canellos is managing editor for enterprise at POLITICO and the author of The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America's Judicial Hero (2021), which Publishers' Weekly named one of the 20 best nonfiction books of 2021. He is an award-winning journalist who served as editorial page editor of The Boston Globe and executive editor of POLITICO. In 2023, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the George Polk Award for journalistic excellence.
Please register at www.pspl.org/event/fhls-canellos. For more information, contact Diane Dehoney at (502) 352-2665 x100 or diane@pspl.org.