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The Big Sandy
The Big Sandy River and its two main tributaries, the Tug and Levisa forks, drain nearly two million mountainous acres in the easternmost part of Kentucky. For generations, the only practical means of transportation and contact with the outside world was the river, and, as The Big Sandy demonstrates, steamboats did much to shape the culture of the region. Carol Crowe-Carraco offers an intriguing and readable account of this region’s history from the days of the venturesome Long Hunters of the eighteenth century, through the bitter struggles of the Civil War and its aftermath, up to the 1970s, with their ...Read More
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Dear Alben: Mr. Barkley of Kentucky
Alben Barkley’s final words before he was struck down by a heart attack summed up his long, eventful life: “I have served my country and my people for half a century as a Democrat. I went to the House of Representatives in 1913 and served fourteen years. I was a junior Congressman, then I became a senior Congressman, then I went to the Senate and became a junior Senator, and then I became a senior Senator; and then a Majority Leader in the Senate, and then Vice President of the United States, and now I am back again as a ...Read More
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Kentucky in the Reconstruction Era
Although Kentucky was not subject to reconstruction as such, the period of readjustment following the Civil War was a troubled one for the Commonwealth. Violence begun by guerillas continued for years. In addition, white “Regulatorstried to cow the new freedmen and keep them in a perpetual state of fearful submission that would assure the agricultural labor supply.
Their attacks produced exactly the effects whites least desired: the blacks became all the more determined to leave the countryside, and the federal government imposed the Freedmen’s Bureau to protect the former slaves. Kentucky in the Reconstruction Era shows how this and other ...Read More
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A Kentucky Sampler: Essays from The Filson Club History Quarterly 1926–1976
The Filson Club History Quarterly, first published in 1926, has long enjoyed a reputation as one of the nation's finest regional historical journals. Over the years it has published excellent essays on virtually every aspect of Kentucky history. Gathered together here for the first time are twenty-eight selections, chosen from the first fifty years of the journal's publication. These essays span the range of Kentucky history and culture from frontier criminals to best sellers by Kentucky women writers, and from Indian place names to twentieth century bank failures. Included among the essayists are Thomas D. Clark, J. Winston Coleman, Jr., ...Read More
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Kentucky: Decades of Discord, 1865-1900
This period of Kentucky's history began with the unsettled society following the close of the Civil War, included bloody feuds, and closed with the tragic Goebel assassination. This book is the most thorough and most ambitious study yet made of that significant time, and the authors recapture the drama and color of these exciting, violent, partisan, and important years. Hambleton Tapp and James C. Klotter trace the progress—or lack of it—in such fields as agriculture, architecture, commerce, literature and general culture. They present the sporting and social life of both the masses and the elite. The story of the halting ...Read More
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The Green River of Kentucky
Cutting a wide east-west swath from the Appalachian foothills to the heart of the western Kentucky coalfields, the Green River valley extends from below the Tennessee border in the south to the Ohio River in the north. The Green River of Kentucky presents a picture of the unity and diversity of the people living in the Green River valley.
Helen Bartter Crocker finds that each generation of its people approached the river in a distinctive way. Early settlers used the river simply as it was—crooked and narrow with an unpredictable water flow, and navigable only under high-water conditions. The sons ...Read More
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Cassius Marcellus Clay: Firebrand of Freedom
The most colorful member of Kentucky’s most illustrious family, Cassius Marcellus Clay is a legendary figure in the Bluegrass. This lively biography records both the traditions surrounding Clay and the historical facts of his life, which are themselves the stuff of legend. Although Clay was a dedicated emancipationist, his real interest lay in broad issues of human freedom. The story of Clay's True American, his service in the Mexican War, his accomplishments as Lincoln's minister to Russia, and his active post-Civil War political life are all told against the background of the climactic events of a lifetime that spanned almost ...Read More
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John Sherman Cooper: The Global Kentuckian
From the late 1940s through the 1970s, John Sherman Cooper, a quiet lawyer from Kentucky, ascended to become one of America’s leading statesmen. Cooper’s embodiment of the values of his rural upbringing, his understanding of people and their problems, and his openness and integrity were the qualities that Schulman believes, paradoxically won him success in dealing with the most powerful and sophisticated of the world’s leaders. They are the qualities elicited in this warm memoir.
Cooper’s political career began in his native Pulaski County, where he served two terms as county judge during the Depression. But its climax came in ...Read More
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The Lady and the President: The Letters of Dorothea Dix and Millard Fillmore
When the private papers of Millard Fillmore, thought to have been destroyed in 1889, were discovered they proved to include a large number of letters to Fillmore from Dorothea Dix, the renowned crusader for the humane treatment of the insane. Almost simultaneously, the letters of Fillmore to Dix, which had lain forgotten in a private collection since 1887, became available.
Thus overnight a correspondence of more than a hundred and fifty letters, spanning nearly twenty years, opened new perspectives upon two prominent Americans whose friendship was known to few during their lifetimes and had long been forgotten by historians.
All ...Read More
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The Armies of the Streets: The New York City Draft Riots of 1863
In July 1863 New York City experienced widespread rioting unparalleled in the history of the nation. Here for the first time is a scholarly analysis of the Draft Riots, dealing with motives and with the reasons for the recurring civil disorders in nineteenth-century New York: the appalling living conditions, the corruption of the civic government, and the geographical and economic factors that led up to the social upheaval.
Adrian Cook was educated at Johns Hopkins and at the University of Cambridge, where he took a double first and a Ph.D. While completing this book he was a Fellow of the ...Read More
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