Browse

This book focuses on what historians have come to call the “middling sort”, the economic group falling between yeoman farmers and the planter class that dominated the antebellum South. At a time when Southerners rarely traveled far from their homes, these merchants annually ventured forth on buying junkets to northern cities. The southern merchant community promoted the kind of aggressive business practices that proponents of the “New South” would later claim as their own. This book reveals the peculiar strains of modern liberal-capitalist and conservative thought that permeated the culture of southern merchants. By exploring the values men and women in merchant families espoused, the book not only offers new insight into southern history but also deepens our understanding of the mutable ties between regional identity and the marketplace in nineteenth-century America.

Tobacco farms, once an iconic symbol of American history, are disappearing from the landscape. It is difficult for many people to view the loss of tobacco as lamentable. For many Kentuckians, however, the loss of what was historically the state's largest cash crop and an important symbol of regional identity has vast economic and cultural consequences. This book examines changes faced by burley tobacco farmers in Central Kentucky over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st—from changing farm technologies, labor sources, and marketing practices and circumstances, to changed social and political understandings of the crop they grow—and the consequences of those changes. The book describes the steps involved in raising burley tobacco and how these steps have changed over the years, as learned through folklore fieldwork: through time spent on Kentucky farms and in recorded interviews with farmers. The book then traces tobacco's move—during the lives of today's farmers—from a symbol of Kentucky heritage to a stigmatized crop. Finally, the book examines the nostalgia generated by these changes and the question that tobacco farmers are increasingly asked: “Why don’t you raise something else?”—a question with as many answers as there are farmers. This book examines some of those answers.

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 of power across geographic scales. The book illustrates the crucial role played by mobile readers—regional elites, out-migrants and in-migrants, tourists, and missionaries—in constructing an Authentic Appalachia. For all fans, but for mobile readers in particular, Appalachia represented what they believed to be the nation's roots in “pioneer” white agrarian society and held out the tantalizing promise of a harmonious and rooted way of life. Appalachian-set best sellers stimulated the formation of a regional identity that critiqued the emotional costs of upward mobility, soothed white readers' concerns about lack of identity and belonging, and fostered readers' attachments to place in a highly mobile society that belittled rural locales. The book cautions that popular fiction's pastoral versions of Appalachia may have romanticized whiteness, glorified white American nationalism, and reinforced readers' imagination of primitive peoples the world over as in need of guidance from well-to-do Americans.

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. With regard to conventional approaches in a variety of academic disciplines, it has been discouraged to use traditions to explain cultural ideas and actions. The book proposes a methodology and theory of “cultural praxis” to explain the modern anxieties about mass society and the creation, maintenance, and adaptation of traditions in modern life.

When Evelyn Waugh wrote The Loved One (1948) as a satire of the elaborate preparations and memorialization of the dead taking place in his time, he had no way of knowing how technical and extraordinarily creative human funerary practices would become in the ensuing decades. This book explores how modern American funerals and their accompanying rituals have evolved into affairs that help the living with the healing process. The book suggests that there is irony in the festivities surrounding death. The typical American response to death often develops into a celebration that reestablishes links or strengthens ties between family members and friends. The increasingly important funerary banquet, for example, honors an often well-lived life in order to help survivors accept the change that death brings and to provide healing fellowship. At such celebrations and other forms of the traditional wake, participants often use humor to add another dimension to expressing both the personality of the deceased and their ties to a particular ethnic heritage. In research and interviews, the book discovers the paramount importance of food as part of the funeral ritual. During times of loss, individuals want to be consoled, and this is often accomplished through the preparation and consumption of nourishing, comforting foods. This book examines rituals for loved ones separated by death, frivolities surrounding death, funeral foods and feasts, post-funeral rites, and personalized memorials and grave markers. The book concludes that though Americans come from many different cultural traditions, they deal with death in a largely similar way. They emphasize unity and embrace rites that soothe the distress of death as a way to heal and move forward.

Louisville native John Jacob Niles (1892–1980) is considered to be one of America's most influential musicians. As a composer and balladeer, Niles drew inspiration from the deep well of traditional Appalachian and African American folk songs. At the age of 16 Niles wrote one of his most enduring tunes, “Go 'Way from My Window,” basing it on a song fragment from a black farm worker. This iconic song has been performed by folk artists ever since and may even have inspired the opening line of Bob Dylan's “It Ain't Me Babe.” This book offers a rich portrait of the musician's character and career. Using Niles's own accounts from his journals, notebooks, and unpublished autobiography, the book tracks his rise from farm boy to songwriter and folk collector extraordinaire. Niles was especially interested in documenting the voices of his fellow World War I soldiers, the people of Appalachia, and the spirituals of African Americans. In the 1920s he collaborated with noted photographer Doris Ulmann during trips to Appalachia, where he transcribed, adapted, and arranged traditional songs and ballads such as “Pretty Polly” and “Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair.”

Simply expressed, the book is a history of Kentucky cookbooks. The cookbooks considered include those written by authors with roots in Kentucky or produced by Kentucky-based groups such as churches, schools, homemaker association, service organizations, and others. The text is accompanied by an extensive bibliography of Kentucky cookbooks. Following an introductory discussion of cookbooks and their recipes, chapters are arranged chronologically, starting with a discussion of the earliest Kentucky cookbook, The Kentucky Housewife, written by Mrs. Lettice Bryan and published in 1839. Succeeding chapters focus on Kentucky cookbooks produced after the Civil War; in the early twentieth century, especially those associated with the domestic science movement; in the Depression and New Deal eras; in the World War II era; in the mid-twentieth century, with an emphasis on convenience; and in the bicentennial era and beyond, with an emphasis on iconic Kentucky recipes. The last chapter considers contemporary cookbooks and the local food movement. In general, the chapters cover changes in cooking technology and ingredients; social changes related to race, ethnicity, and gender; evolving styles of cookbook and recipe presentation; and transformations in the social role of food. In a number of chapters, cookbooks written by African American Kentuckians are discussed.

Two overland routes provided eighteenth-century migrants from the middle Atlantic coast access to the Ohio River valley's fertile Kentucky country. A southern route, the Wilderness Road, crossed Cumberland Gap to gain access to the Bluegrass plains. A northern route brought migrants down the Ohio River to Maysville. An overland wagon road, the Maysville Road, linked Maysville to Lexington, a frontier fort and trade town some sixty-seven miles southwest. The Maysville Road was America's first highway into the trans-Appalachian West. Roads are compliant, linear places that change, slowly or quickly, and become something different. The historical composite road-roadside landscape becomes palimpsest of structures and land uses. A geographical history perspective develops an evolutionary road typology that begins with organic tracks and proceeds through time and technology changes to modern highways. Once established, roads become formative in that they enable and direct community development and change. A landscape biography documents the road's historical geography through a comprehensive narrative that interprets the road and its attendant roadside landscapes of villages and farms. The historical geography of the Maysville Road is an epic, composed as is no other. The road is the theater of local settlement, an engine of regional economic development, an icon of national political process, and it has served as a significant force in landscape creation and destruction.

Many native North American cultures have origins that predate Confucius, who lived 500 years before the birth of Christ. For generations the people of these traditions have thrived under conditions that many view as harsh, if not hostile. Through their close association with nature, members of native communities have created complex systems for cooperating with one another and living within their environments. This book explains how to nurture a society by closely observing the traditions of various native cultures. It explores the need to live sustainably, in harmony with the land, in order to preserve our cultures, communities, and humankind itself. The book asserts that all cultures are subsistence cultures: urban or rural, all humans depend on the land and its provisions for survival. Humankind faces a convergence of forces: climate change, oil depletion, loss of water, loss of topsoil, and species die-off of proportions that exceed those of the past 65 million years.

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 most extensive holdings available for study in the region. This volume begins with a cultural chronology: a backdrop of critical events that shaped the taste and times of both artist and sitter. The chronology is followed by brief biographies of the artists, both legends and recent discoveries, illustrated by their work. Matthew Harris Jouett (who studied with Gilbert Stuart), William Edward West (who painted Lord Byron), and Frank Duveneck are well-known; far less so are James T. Poindexter (who painted children's portraits in western Kentucky), Reason Croft (a recently discovered itinerant in the Louisville area), and Oliver Frazer (the last resident portrait artist in Lexington during the romantic era).

When Gene Logsdon realized that he experienced the same creative joy from farming as he did from writing, he suspected that agriculture itself was a form of art. Thus began his search for the origins of the artistic impulse in the agrarian lifestyle. This book is the culmination of Logsdon's journey, his account of friendships with farmers and artists driven by the urge to create. It chronicles his long relationship with Wendell Berry and talks about how he discovered the playful humor of several new agrarian writers. It reveals insights gleaned from conversations with Andrew Wyeth and his family of artists. Through his association with musicians such as Willie Nelson and his involvement with Farm Aid, Logsdon learns how music—blues, jazz, country, and even rock and roll—is also rooted in agriculture. It sheds new light on the work of rural painters, writers, and musicians and suggests that their art could be created only by those who work intimately with the land. Unlike the gritty realism or abstract expressionism often favored by contemporary critics, agrarian art evokes familiar feelings of community and comfort. Most importantly, the book demonstrates that diminishing the connection between art and nature lessens the social and aesthetic value of both. It also explores these cultural connections and traces the development of a new agrarian culture that it states will eventually replace the model brought about by the industrial revolution.

Through the lens of the colorful life of John Morrissey, this book examines the confluence of gambling, politics, and tourism that contributed to the development of commercialized sports in mid- to late nineteenth-century America. Morrissey rose from abject poverty in Troy, New York, to become a champion bare-knuckle boxer by the age of twenty-two. He capitalized on the fame and notoriety he achieved as a prizefighter, becoming the leading casino operator in New York City before opening a gambling house in Saratoga Springs. There he organized the area’s first Thoroughbred race meet in 1863. In 1866, although the national press was highly critical of his connections to boxing and gambling, he was elected to Congress with the help of his association with Tammany Hall, serving two terms before again focusing on his gambling and sporting interests. By the 1870s Morrissey had helped to establish Saratoga as one of the leading sporting cities in America. In 1875 he was elected to the New York senate, where he became a defender of the interests of the poor and working classes. Months after his election to a second term he died at the age of forty-seven. Though he never lost his connection to pugilism and gambling, Morrissey achieved a modicum of vindication in obituaries appearing in newspapers across the country as journalists acknowledged his many and varied achievements and the depths of poverty from which he had risen.

Politics, while always an integral part of the daily life in the southern United States, took on a new level of importance after the Civil War. Today, political strategists view the South as an essential region to cultivate if political hopefuls are to have a chance of winning elections at the national level. Although operating within the context of a secular government, American politics is decidedly marked by a Christian influence. In the mostly Protestant South, religion and politics have long been nearly inextricable. This book examines the powerful role that religious considerations and influence have played in American political discourse. This collection of thirteen chapters explores the intersection in the South of religion, politics, race relations, and southern culture from post-Civil War America to the present, when the Religious Right has exercised a profound impact on the course of politics in the region as well as the nation. The chapters examine issues such as religious attitudes about race on the Jim Crow South; Billy Graham's influence on the civil rights movement; political activism and the Southern Baptist Convention; and Dorothy Tilly, a white Methodist woman, and her contributions as a civil rights reformer during the 1940s and 1950s. The volume also considers the issue of whether southerners felt it was their sacred duty to prevent American society from moving away from its Christian origins toward a new, secular identity and how this perceived God-given responsibility was reflected in the work of southern political and church leaders.

The industrial expansion of the twentieth century brought with it a profound shift away from traditional agricultural modes and practices in the American South. The forces of economic modernity—specialization, mechanization, and improved efficiency—swept through southern farm communities, leaving significant upheaval in their wake. In an attempt to comprehend the complexities of the present and prepare for the uncertainties of the future, many southern farmers searched for order and meaning in their memories of the past. This book explores the ways in which a diverse array of farmers remember and recount the past. The book tells the story of the modernization of the South in the voices of those most affected by the decline of traditional ways of life and work. The book analyzes the recurring patterns in their narratives of change and loss, filling in gaps left by more conventional political and economic histories of southern agriculture. The book also highlights the tensions inherent in the relationship between history and memory. The book employs the concept of “communities of memory” to describe the shared sense of the past among southern farmers. History and memory converge and shape one another in communities of memory through an ongoing process in which shared meanings emerge through an elaborate alchemy of recollection and interpretation.

This book explores the changing social ideas that have determined wages for women during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The struggle between the concepts of identity, traditional gender roles, and the workforce has historically led to much conflict as women tried to gain first a minimum wage, and then equal pay for equal work. Even today, the debate still exists concerning women, work, motherhood, and careers. This book investigates how wage exists as a social construct that influences the way women are compensated for their work, creating the boundaries between what is deemed appropriate for women to earn in comparison to men. The book calls attention to the role gender has played in the economy and proposes a new understanding of a “social wage” as a way to erase the differences between a man’s and a woman’s wage.