“Liquor-Laden Schooner,” courtesy of Robert McKenna, who presents a free, illustrated talk Sunday at Essex Meadows on rum-running during Prohibition.

Explore the dark side of the state’s past this winter at “Connecticut History’s Bad Boys,” a lecture series presented by Essex Historical Society and Essex Meadows on Sunday afternoons at 3 p.m. The next talk will be held Sunday, Feb. 28, when Robert McKenna will present “Smuggling at Sea During Prohibition: The Real McCoy, The Bootleg Queen, Rum Row, and the Origin of the U.S. Coast Guard.”

These illustrated talks are held at Essex Meadows, 30 Bokum Rd., and are free and open to the public.  Each program features in-depth discussion about our state’s shadowy characters, such as spies, rum-runners and traitors, placing them in historical context with their equally dark and mysterious times along Connecticut’s Shoreline.

McKenna is an author and the expert on rum-running during Prohibition. He has researched, updated, edited and republished six books about liquor smuggling in the 1920s. He was a researcher, subject matter expert and executive producer of the five-time Emmy Award winning documentary film The Real McCoy (2012), and a contributor to Connecticut Public Television’s Emmy-winning documentary Connecticut Goes Dry (2012). As a former Coast Guard officer, he interdicted smugglers and practiced the legal precedents that were established during the Prohibition-era.

The series concludes on Sunday, March 6, as Eric D. Lehman, author of Homegrown Terror: Benedict Arnold and the Burning of New London, discusses how Connecticut native Benedict Arnold and 1,600 British soldiers and loyalists captured Fort Griswold and burned down the settlement of New London in 1781.

The lecture also explores how and why Arnold betrayed his countrymen and killed his neighbors.

Lehman, a professor of creative writing at the University of Bridgeport, has widely published fiction, travel stories, essays and nonfiction.

More information can be found at www.essexhistory.org or by calling Essex Historical Society, 860-767-0681.