History Faculty Book Gallery

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The Gateway Arch: A Biography

Rising to a triumphant height of 630 feet, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis is a revered monument to America’s western expansion. Envisioned in 1947 but not completed until the mid-1960s, the arch today attracts millions of tourists annually and is one of the world’s most widely recognized structures. By weaving together social, political, and cultural history, historian Tracy Campbell uncovers the complicated and troubling history of the beloved structure. This compelling book explores how a medley of players with widely divergent motivations (civic pride, ambition, greed, among others) brought the Gateway Arch to fruition, but at a price the ...Read More
Uneven Ground: Appalachia since 1945

Appalachia has played a complex and often contradictory role in the unfolding of American history. Created by urban journalists in the years following the Civil War, the idea of Appalachia provided a counterpoint to emerging definitions of progress. Early-twentieth-century critics of modernity saw the region as a remnant of frontier life, a reflection of simpler times that should be preserved and protected. However, supporters of development and of the growth of material production, consumption, and technology decried what they perceived as the isolation and backwardness of the place and sought to “uplift” the mountain people through education and industrialization. This ...Read More
Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and Compromise of 1850

The crisis facing the United States in 1850 was a dramatic prologue to the conflict that came a decade later. The rapid opening of western lands demanded the speedy establishment of local civil administration for these vast regions. Outraged partisans, however, cried of coercion: Southerners saw a threat to the precarious sectional balance, and Northerners feared an extension of slavery. In this definitive study, Holman Hamilton analyzes the complex events of the anxious months from December, 1849, when the Senate debates began, until September, 1850, when Congress passed the measures.

Holman Hamilton is the author of a two-volume work about ...Read More
The Greening of the South: The Recovery of Land and Forest

In the early 1920s, in many a sawmill town across the South, the last quitting-time whistle signaled the cutting of the last log of a company's timber holdings and the end of an era in southern lumbering. It marked the end as well of the great primeval forest that covered most of the South when Europeans first invaded it.

Much of the first forest, despite the labors of pioneer loggers, remained intact after the Civil War. But after the restrictions of the Southern Homestead Act were removed in 1876, lumbermen and speculators rushed in to acquire millions of acres of ...Read More
Agrarian Kentucky

For subsistence farmers in eastern Kentucky, wealthy horse owners in the central Bluegrass, and tobacco growers in Western Kentucky, land was, and continues to be, one of the commonwealth’s greatest sources of economic growth. It is also a source of nostalgia for a people devoted to tradition, a characteristic that has significantly influenced Kentucky’s culture, sometimes to the detriment of education and development.

As timely now as when it was first published, Thomas D. Clark’s classic history of agrarianism prepares readers for a new era that promises to bring rapid change to the land and the people of Kentucky.

The ...Read More
The Three Kentucky Presidents: Lincoln, Taylor, Davis

The three Kentucky presidents—Abraham Lincoln, Zachary Taylor, and Jefferson Davis—were profoundly shaped by their experiences in Kentucky, poised as it was on the border between the North and the South, the East and the Western Frontier. Holman Hamilton asserts that these leaders were personally and politically influenced by their connections to the state. The contrasting traits of western frontiersman and southern aristocrat illuminate Kentucky’s heritage and affected Taylor, Lincoln, and Davis, presidents during one of America’s most troubled eras. Frontier values influenced Lincoln’s and Taylor’s views on the major issues of their time: extension of slavery, which they opposed, and ...Read More
Johnny Green of the Orphan Brigade: The Journal of a Confederate Soldier

John W. Green (1841-1920), an enlisted man with Kentucky’s famed Confederate Orphan Brigade throughout the Civil War, fought at Shiloh, Baton Rouge, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, Atlanta and many other crucial battles. An acute observer with a flair for humanizing the impersonal horror of war, he kept a record of his experiences, and penned an exciting front-line account of America’s defining trial by fire.

Albert D. Kirwan provides a brief history of the Orphan Brigade and a biography of Johnny Green. Introductions to each chapter explain references in the journal and also set the context for the major campaigns.

Winner of the ...Read More
Footloose in Jacksonian America: Robert W. Scott and his Agrarian World

In the fall of 1829, young Robert Wilmot Scott rode away from Frankfort, Kentucky, on a trip that would take him through nine states. His journal entries about those travels present a vivid picture of Jacksonian America and of the prominent people of that era. Excellent pen portraits of James and Dolly Madison, James Monroe, John Marshall, James Buchanan, Sam Houston, Edward Everett, John C. Calhoun, John Randolph, John Quincy Adams, and others show Scott to be a careful and detailed observer. Present at the famous Webster-Hayne debate, he gives a rich account of that discussion and its personalities.

But ...Read More
The Public Papers of Governor Brereton C. Jones, 1991-1995

In his inaugural address, Governor Brereton C. Jones proclaimed, "This administration is committed to having the most positive, progressive, exciting four years in our state's history."

Through speeches and press releases, this volume reflects the principal concerns of Jones’s time in office. Thematically organized, the more than two hundred public statements included here present the public face of the Jones administration on such issues as health care, education, economic development, the environment, and governmental reform. Nowhere else has the full text of these speeches and press releases been printed.

Governor Jones, born in 1939, was elected to the West Virginia ...Read More
A History of the Hemp Industry in Kentucky

It is hard to believe that at one time burley tobacco was not the chief cash crop in Kentucky. Yet for more than half a century hemp dominated the state's agricultural production.

James Hopkins surveys the hemp industry in Kentucky from its beginning through its complete demise at the end of World War II, describing the processes of seeding and harvesting the plant, and marketing manufactured goods made of the fiber.

With debate presently raging over the legalization of industrial hemp, it is essential that an accurate portrait of this controversial resource be available. Although originally published in 1951, Hopkins's ...Read More