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Crawfish Bottom: Recovering a Lost Kentucky Community
A small neighborhood in north Frankfort, Kentucky, Crawfish Bottom was located on fifty acres of swampy land along the Kentucky River. “Craw's” reputation for vice, violence, moral corruption, and unsanitary conditions made it a target for state funded urban renewal projects that replaced the neighborhood with Frankfort's Capital Plaza in the mid 1960s. This book traces the evolution of the controversial, yet close-knit community that saw 400 families ultimately displaced by urban renewal policies. Using oral histories and first-hand memories, this book not only provides a record of a vanished neighborhood and its culture but also exemplifies the ways in ...Read More
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Explaining Traditions: Folk Behavior in Modern Culture
This book discusses the underlying reasons for the continuing popularity of traditions, delving into their social and psychological roles in everyday life. The book argues that despite intellectual and political movements to dismiss tradition as a force in social life, the concept has persisted and remained important to people in the formation of modern culture and folklore. The book points to the functions of traditions as cultural expressions connecting the past and the present, and engaging and adapting practices as symbolic projections of anxieties, hopes, and aspirations. Traditions that are covered include architecture, craft, legends, tales, sports, and the Internet. ...Read More
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Appalachian Travels: The Diary of Olive Dame Campbell
Olive Dame Campbell is best known as a ballad collector, but she was also a social reformer in Appalachia. Her diary is a the record of a trip that she and her husband, John C. Campbell, made in the early part of the 20th century to gather data for the Russell Sage Foundation about the true social, religious, and economic conditions in the Southern Highlands. Visiting eastern Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, and western North Carolina, they interviewed missionaries, teachers, and settlement school workers, going to out-of-the-way villages and towns on roads that were often nothing more than creek beds. After John ...Read More
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A Tour of Reconstruction: Travel Letters of 1875
During the Civil War, public speaker Anna Elizabeth Dickinson became a national sensation, lecturing on abolitionism, women's rights, and the Union war effort. After the war she remained one of the nation's most celebrated orators and among the country's most famous women. In 1875 Dickinson toured the South, lecturing and inspecting life in the southern states ten years after the war. Her letters are a fascinating window into race relations, gender relations, and the state of the southern economy and society a decade after Appomattox. In a series of long letters home to her mother, Dickinson describes the places she ...Read More
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Arab and Jewish Women in Kentucky: Stories of Accommodation and Audacity
Arabs and Jews are thought to inhabit the Middle East or urban areas in the United States, not Kentucky or other out of the way locales. Arab and Jewish Women in Kentucky: Stories of Accommodation and Audacity explores the untold accounts of ten Arab and Jewish women who managed in the past and currently their unique identities tending to both their religious/ethnic traditions and acculturating to Kentucky ways. In the details of women's stories, ties between Arabs and Jews not in the Middle East, but middle America, emerge. Common ground surfaces displaying Arab and Jewish women with similar tales of ...Read More
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Dear Appalachia: Readers, Identity, and Popular Fiction since 1878
This book demonstrates the value of using fan mail and online customer reviews to determine what meanings readers made of popular fictions set in Appalachia. Employing the methodological innovation of “reception geographies,” the book examines readers' testimonials alongside maps of their migrations in order to assess the ways in which their geographic movements and affiliations influenced their imagined geographies of Appalachia as a haven from modernity and postmodernity. The book argues that regional fiction served three functions for U.S. readers in multiple eras: it produced regions as authentic places, enabled readers' construction of identity and belonging; and facilitated the circulation ...Read More
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Moonshiners and Prohibitionists: The Battle over Alcohol in Southern Appalachia
Homemade liquor has played a prominent role in the Appalachian economy for nearly two centuries. The region endured profound transformations during the extreme prohibition movements of the nineteenth century, when the manufacturing and sale of alcohol—an integral part of daily life for many Appalachians—was banned. This book chronicles the social tensions that accompanied the region's early transition from a rural to an urban-industrial economy. The book analyzes the dynamic relationship of the bootleggers and opponents of liquor sales in western North Carolina, as well as conflict driven by social and economic development that manifested in political discord. The book also ...Read More
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Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars
In addition to war, terrorism, and unchecked military violence, modernity is also subject to less visible but no less venomous conflicts. Global in nature, these “culture wars” exacerbate the tensions between tradition and innovation, virtue and freedom. This book charts a course beyond these persistent but curable dichotomies. Consulting diverse fields such as philosophy, literature, political science, and religious studies, the book equates modern history with a process of steady pluralization. This process, which the book calls “integral pluralism,” requires new connections and creates ethical responsibilities. The book critically compares integral pluralism against the theories of Carl Schmitt, the Religious ...Read More
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Lessons in Likeness: Portrait Painters in Kentucky and the Ohio River Valley, 1802-1920
From 1802, when the young artist William Edward West began painting portraits on a downriver trip to New Orleans, to 1918, when John Alberts, the last of Frank Duveneck's students, worked in Louisville, a wide variety of portrait artists were active in Kentucky and the Ohio River Valley. This book charts the course of those artists as they painted the mighty and the lowly, statesmen and business magnates as well as country folk living far from urban centers. Paintings by each artist are illustrated, when possible, from The Filson Historical Society collection of some 400 portraits representing one of the ...Read More
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Toward Freedom Land: The Long Struggle for Racial Equality in America
The ongoing struggle for civil rights and social justice lies at the heart of America's evolving identity. The pursuit of equal rights is often met with social and political trepidation, forcing citizens and leaders to grapple with controversial issues of race, class, and gender. This book assembles writings on twentieth–century race relations, representing some of the finest race-related historical research on record. Spanning thirty–five years of research, the collection features an in-depth examination of the Great Depression and its effects on African Americans, the intriguing story of the labor movement and its relationship to African American workers, and a discussion ...Read More
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