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Before the Quagmire: American Intervention in Laos, 1954-1961
This book discusses the formulation and execution of U.S. foreign policy in Laos from 1954, when the Geneva Accords ended the First Indochina War, until January 1961, when John F. Kennedy became president. A key initial misstep on the U.S. road to war in Southeast Asia, the American experience in Laos during the Eisenhower administration is a case study in transforming a small foreign policy problem into a large one. Based on documents from the U.S. National Archives, the Eisenhower Library, and other public and private collections of primary sources, the book shows how the administration's efforts to thwart communism ...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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Nothing Less Than War: A New History of America’s Entry into World War I
This history of how Woodrow Wilson attempted to keep the United States out of World War I is also an exercise in nostalgia for an era when Americans debated a war before the president launched one rather than afterward. The book states that Americans greeted Germany's 1914 invasion of Belgium with horrified fascination, but with little sense of foreboding. Most citizens and President Woodrow Wilson favored the Allies, but wanted to remain neutral. The book recounts how this feeling gradually changed over two and a half years in response to Germany's self-defeating actions, the foremost being the new submarine warfare, ...Read More
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Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South
White southerners recognized that the perpetuation of segregation required whites of all ages to uphold a strict social order — especially the young members of the next generation. White children rested at the core of the system of segregation between 1890 and 1939 because their participation was crucial to ensuring the future of white supremacy. Their socialization in the segregated South offers an examination of white supremacy from the inside, showcasing the culture's efforts to preserve itself by teaching its beliefs to the next generation. This book reveals how white adults in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continually ...Read More
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A History of Education in Kentucky
This book is divided into four periods: 1775 to the beginning of the Civil War, the Civil War to 1900, 1900 to 1941, and World War II to the mid-1980s. Where K12 and higher education intersect, these connections are developed and explained. The book's epilogue also explains the reforms brought about through the Kentucky Education Reform Act and the changes that occurred in higher education from the Patton years to the near present. The history of education in Kentucky cannot be understood without a grounding in political, social, economic, and ethnic history. Moreover, what happens in Kentucky is always part ...Read More
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Constructing Affirmative Action: The Struggle for Equal Employment Opportunity
Between 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson defined affirmative action as a legitimate federal goal, and 1972, when President Richard M. Nixon named one of affirmative action's chief antagonists the head of the Department of Labor, government officials at all levels addressed racial economic inequality in earnest. Providing members of historically disadvantaged groups an equal chance at obtaining limited and competitive positions, affirmative action had the potential to alienate large numbers of white Americans, even those who had viewed school desegregation and voting rights in a positive light. Thus, affirmative action was — and continues to be — controversial. This ...Read More
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After the Dream: Black and White Southerners since 1965
Martin Luther King's 1965 address from Montgomery, Alabama, the center of much racial conflict at the time and the location of the well-publicized bus boycott a decade earlier, is often considered by historians to be the culmination of the civil rights era in American history. In his momentous speech, King declared that segregation was “on its deathbed” and that the movement had already achieved significant milestones. Although the civil rights movement had won many battles in the struggle for racial equality by the mid-1960s, including legislation to guarantee black voting rights and to desegregate public accommodations, the fight to implement ...Read More
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Frank L. McVey and the University of Kentucky: A Progressive President and the Modernization of a Southern University
In 1917, fifty-two years after its founding, the University of Kentucky faced stagnation, financial troubles, and disturbing reports of nepotism, resulting in a leadership crisis. A special committee investigated the institution and issued a report calling for a massive transformation of the university, including the hiring of a new president who could execute the report's suggested initiatives. The Board of Trustees hired Frank L. McVey. McVey labored tirelessly for more than two decades to establish Kentucky as one of the nation's most respected institutions of higher learning, which brought him recognition as one of the leading progressive educators in the ...Read More
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One of Morgan’s Men: Memoirs of Lieutenant John M. Porter of the Ninth Kentucky Cavalry
John Marion Porter (1839–1898) grew up working at his family's farm and dry goods store in Butler County, Kentucky. The oldest of Reverend Nathaniel Porter's nine children, he was studying to become a lawyer when the Civil War began. As the son of a family of slave owners, Porter identified with the Southern cause and wasted little time enlisting in the Confederate army. He and his lifelong friend Thomas Henry Hines served in the Ninth Kentucky Calvary under John Hunt Morgan, the “Thunderbolt of the Confederacy.” When the war ended, Porter and Hines opened a law practice together, but Porter ...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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