
October Event: Meet Col. Charles Young – A Kentucky Chautauqua Performance
September 8, 2025
December Event: 32nd Annual Christmas Tea Room
September 9, 2025
Eve Kahn: Exploring Harrodsburg Native, Zoe Anderson Norris
Independent scholar Eve M. Kahn, author of the new biography Queen of Bohemia Predicts Own Death: Gilded-Age Journalist Zoe Anderson Norris (Fordham U. Press), will explore how Harrodsburg-born Zoe Anderson Norris (1860-1914) evolved from an impoverished Kentuckian theologian’s daughter into a restless Kansan housewife and then a prolific New York writer, reformer, and publisher who documented desperate immigrant poverty.
Event Details: November 11, 2025 at 7PM
Harrodsburg Historical Society is proud to present author Eve Kahn: Exploring Harrodsburg Native, Zoe Anderson Norris.
This event is free and open to the public!
Please join us at The Harrodsburg Historical Society located at 220 S. Chiles St, Harrodsburg, KY 40330
Who Was Zoe Anderson Norris
In her bimonthly magazine The East Side, Zoe (as everyone called her) set out “to fight for the poor with my pen.” She sometimes reported undercover, dressed as a beggar, and raged against forces that remain pernicious: policemen brutalizing street peddlers, hypocritical charity executives splurging on themselves, child laborers tottering under burdens, millionaire deadbeat dads evading prosecution, predatory bosses cornering underlings... Her fellow Manhattan bohemians—writers, filmmakers, performers, politicians—joined an intentionally disorganized organization that she founded, the Ragged Edge Klub, and appointed her Queen of Bohemia, so she handed out aristocratic titles to Klub members: Lady Betty Rogers of the Bronx, for instance, and Baron Bernhardt of Hoboken.
Zoe’s Kentucky upbringing also influenced her writings; she compared New York’s landscape and inhabitants to her homeland’s velvety bluegrass, hair-triggered feudists, whiskey distillers, schoolmarms, evangelists, musicians playing “My Old Kentucky Home,” and antebellum abolitionists, enslavers and the enslaved.
The last issue of The East Side described her recent dream that she would soon die, and after that accurate premonition made headlines in hundreds of newspapers nationwide, she fell into obscurity, until now… Kahn’s book will be available for sale and signing at the talk.
About the Author
Independent scholar Eve M. Kahn, former Antiques Columnist at The New York Times, writes about art, architecture, and design for the Times among other publications. She is biographer of artist Mary Rogers Williams (1857-1907) and writer Zoe Anderson Norris (1860-1914).




