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This book uses the history of Breathitt County, Kentucky, to examine political violence in the United States and its interpretation in media and memory. From the 1870s until the early twentieth century, Breathitt County was considered a hotbed of interpersonal, or interfamilial, “feud” violence—a tendency that Americans associate with preindustrial “primitive” populations outside of their society as well as with their native “mountain white” population of Appalachia. Violence in Breathitt County, during and after the Civil War, usually reflected what was going on elsewhere in Kentucky and the American South. In turn, the types of violence recorded there corresponded with discernible political scenarios. Some, especially during the war and Reconstruction, involved challenges to the local power structure embodied by the Democratic Party (in the same manner as in the rest of the South). However, most of the more successful, conclusive uses of violence defended this power structure, maintaining a local version of the white-dominated, capitalistic, one-party rule that defined the New South. Meanwhile, Breathitt County's practitioners of violence benefited from Americans’ abiding reluctance to scrutinize political violence. Blood feuds, a common Victorian popular culture motif, suggested a primordial European past, while also suggesting that violence is acted out reciprocally between equal parties and is essentially apolitical. “Feud” provided a ready cultural explanation for killing that helped observers avoid acknowledging the ways in which “Bloody Breathitt” comprised not an aberration from the national status quo, but rather an epitome of a phenomenally violent country.

Though the Civil War ended in April 1865, the conflict between Unionists and Confederates continued. The bitterness and rancor resulting from the collapse of the Confederacy spurred an ongoing cycle of hostility and bloodshed that made the Reconstruction period a violent era of transition. The violence was so pervasive that the federal government deployed units of the U.S. Army in North Carolina and other southern states to maintain law and order and protect blacks and Unionists. This book tells the story of the army's twelve-year occupation of North Carolina, a time of political instability and social unrest. This book details the complex interaction between the federal soldiers and the North Carolina civilians during this tumultuous period. This study examines the military efforts to stabilize the region in the face of opposition from both ordinary citizens and dangerous outlaws such as the Regulators and the Ku Klux Klan. By 1872, the widespread, organized violence that had plagued North Carolina since the close of the war had ceased, enabling the bluecoats and the ex-Confederates to participate in public rituals and social events that served as symbols of sectional reconciliation. This rapprochement has been largely forgotten, lost amidst the postbellum barrage of Lost Cause rhetoric, causing many historians to believe that the process of national reunion did not begin until after Reconstruction.

To most people, the word “Kentucky” is likely to inspire thoughts of Derby Day, burley tobacco fields, feuding Appalachian families, coal mines, and Colonel Sanders' famous fried chicken. There is much more, however, to the Bluegrass State's rich but often unexplored history than mint juleps and the Hatfields and McCoys. This book introduces a captivating story that spans 12,000 years of Kentucky lives, from Native Americans to astronauts. All facets of Kentucky history are explored—geography, government, social structure, culture, education, and the economy—recounting unique historic events such as the deadly frontier wars, the assassination of a governor, and the birth of Bluegrass music. The book features profiles of famous Kentuckians such as Daniel Boone, Abraham Lincoln, Loretta Lynn, and Muhammad Ali, as well as ordinary citizens.

This book explores the centrality of race in the development of Georgia, from its founding in 1733 until the eve of the Civil War. During that time, Georgia's racial order shifted from a more fluid conception of race prevalent in the colonial era to a more harsh understanding of racial difference in the antebellum era. This study argues that long-term structural and demographic changes accounted for this transformation. This book traces the rise of rice cultivation and the plantation complex in lowcountry Georgia in the mid-eighteenth century and charts the spread of slavery into the backcountry in the decades that followed. The growth of the white population in the interior of Georgia after the Revolution repositioned the demographic, economic, and political center of the state. The expulsion of the Creek and Cherokee Indians and subsequent settling of Georgia's black belt gave whites in the upcountry an increasingly influential voice in the state's political affairs, including matters related to slavery and race. The attendant emergence of the cotton kingdom fundamentally re-ordered relations between and among blacks, whites, and Indians. The result was the creation of a racially bifurcated society that stood in marked contrast to the racial order that characterized life in early Georgia.

Between 1846 and 1867 J. D. B. De Bow, the editor of De Bow’s Review, promoted agricultural reform, urbanization, industrialization, and commercial development in the nineteenth-century American South. His monthly journal appealed to thousands of antebellum southerners with similar interests in a modern market economy. His vision and his readers’ support of economic and social diversification predated the rhetoric of postbellum boosters who promised a “New South” after the Civil War. De Bow created an economic plan that resonated among urban, middle-class merchants and professionals, wealthy planters, and prominent industrialists. Like their postbellum counterparts, these antebellum innovators shared a similar message of hope for the future. De Bow successfully consolidated modern economic goals into a cohesive plan, and his reverence for past traditions helped legitimize the future transformation of the South. Although debates over slavery and sectionalism overwhelmed the original intent of the Review, he recovered his editorial balance after supporting secession and experiencing the misery of the Civil War. He rededicated himself to regional economic improvement and asked readers to help reintegrate the South back into the national economy. His comprehensive postwar plan for southern recovery came from his prewar editorial work. Although he died before the next generation of boosters began their public campaign for a New South, De Bow had made the first and most significant contribution to their New South Creed. His anticipation of a modern economy helped create hope for a New South long before the demise of the Old South.

Nature was always vital in Thomas Merton's life, from the long hours he spent as a child watching his father paint landscapes in the fresh air, to his final years of solitude in the hermitage at Our Lady of Gethsemani, where he contemplated and wrote about the beauty of his surroundings. Throughout his life, Merton's study of the natural world shaped his spirituality in profound ways, and he was one of the first writers to raise concern about ecological issues that have become critical in recent years. This book suggests that Merton's interest in nature, which developed significantly during his years at the Abbey of Gethsemani, laid the foundation for his growing environmental consciousness. Tracing Merton's awareness of the natural world from his childhood to the final years of his life, the book explores his deepening sense of place and desire for solitude, his love and responsibility for all living things, and his evolving ecological awareness.

Known as the Great Compromiser, Kentuckian Henry Clay left a valuable legacy to his country by defining the role of Speaker of the House, envisioning a plan, the American System, that foretold the economic development of the nation, and fashioning compromises that postponed civil war until a southern victory was far less likely. He failed, however, to become president, and scholars have placed some blame on his family. This work investigates how his career affected his family and how the family impacted his career. While laboring to form a mature nation, Clay sought to establish a successful family. Accused of excessive ambition, he taught service to nation and loyalty to family. A man of high passions, he channeled a family intoxication with risk and spontaneity into business and service. Fearful of the military mind in politics, he created a family that served its nation at war from the Mexican War through Vietnam. After the Civil War, the patriarch's shadow became both blessing and burden. Inspiring confidence and civic spirit it led to service, but it also pressured each generation to attain his prominence, sometimes leading to reckless behavior and bad decision-making. Clay also bequeathed a susceptibility to illness; tuberculosis and mood disorders destroyed lives and caused fear in an age that did not understand the diseases. Tragedy challenged the family, but looking to the patriarch, they never quit. The Clay story reflects the strength and the struggle of the American family across the expanse of the nation's history.

In 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and other civil rights groups began organizing the Freedom Rides. The Freedom Riders were volunteers of different backgrounds who travelled on buses throughout the American South to help enforce the Supreme Court ruling that had declared racial segregation on public transportation illegal. This book shows how the Freedom Rides were crucial in raising awareness among decision makers and in bringing the realities of racial segregation into American homes through national media coverage.

This is a biography of George Keats, brother of the poet John Keats and a community leader in Louisville. The book examines how the boys’ troubled childhood in London, orphaned at early ages, linked them unusually closely, but also drove each to considerable accomplishment. The book provides the first in-depth analysis of George, heretofore a peripheral player in John Keats biographies. It rounds out a series of prior biographies on Fanny Keats, Fanny Brawne, Joseph Severn, James Leigh Hunt, Charles Brown, and other important influences on the poet's life. It also provides a new and detailed portrait of life in mercantile Louisville from 1818–1841, with a rich appendix describing George's friends, the community's leaders. The work includes nearly 100 images, most in color, from the period. A central theme is whether George Keats did as much for his brother, both in terms of financial support and in creating a legacy, as he might have. Another has to do with his influence on John's poetry. Fresh research describes his problematic relationship with the naturalist John J. Audubon. The Keats family finances are described with clarity.

Henry W. Blair served successful terms in the New Hampshire House of Representatives and Senate. He was then elected to Congress where he served two terms. In all of these races, he proved to be an effective campaigner and a supporter of reform legislation. In 1879, Blair was elected to the United States Senate. He quickly became chairman of the Education and Labor Committee. In this position, he sponsored a number of reform initiatives. Among them were greater recognition of organized labor, greater legal and political rights for women, and Prohibition. His most widely recognized contribution was his Education Bill. This legislation was an attempt to deal with the widespread illiteracy in the United States. Blair remained popular throughout his career winning a second term in the Senate and a one more election to the House of Representatives. He remained active in New Hampshire and national politics after his retirement from the House, and worked closely with his son in a law firm in Washington for the last two decades of his life.

The life of Horace Holley (1781–1827) recalls a time of intellectual promise in the American republic. The New England–born, Yale-educated, Unitarian minister was an unlikely choice for the presidency of Transylvania University in Kentucky, the first college west of the Allegheny Mountains. Kentucky’s religious leaders questioned his orthodoxy; elected officials doubted his abilities; others simply found him arrogant and elitist. As president, however, Holley ushered in a period of sustained educational and cultural growth. Transylvania blossomed under his oversight and received national attention for its scientifically progressive, liberal curriculum. Lexington, Kentucky, the seat of Transylvania, benefited directly from his efforts. An influx of students and celebrated faculty lent the city a distinguished atmosphere and gave credibility to the appellation “Athens of the West.” But Holley’s story is greater than the sum of these experiences. As a young student at a rising American university, a Calvinist minister in a rural New England town, a Unitarian urbanite of national acclaim, a relocated northern Yankee in Kentucky, and president of the first and most prosperous university of the early American West, Holley symbolizes a period of rapid transformation. His experiences reflect a time when westward expansion and social progress ran against developing religious expectations and regional identities. Holley also figures prominently in the history of education in America. His innovations and missteps, successes and defeats, personal connections and bitter advisories make him an important figure not only in the evolution of an emerging state university but also in the emerging state of higher education in early America.

When westward expansion began in the early nineteenth century, the Jewish population of the United States was only 2,500. As Jewish immigration surged over the century between 1820 and 1920, Jews began to find homes in the Ohio River Valley. This book chronicles the settlement and evolution of Jewish communities in small towns on both banks of the river; towns such as East Liverpool and Portsmouth, Ohio, Wheeling, West Virginia, and Madison, Indiana. Though not large, these communities influenced American culture and history by helping to develop the Ohio River Valley while transforming Judaism into an American way of life. The Jewish experience and the regional experience reflected and reinforced each other. Jews shared regional consciousness and pride with their Gentile neighbors. The antebellum Ohio River Valley's identity as a cradle of bourgeois America fitted very well with the middle-class aspirations and achievements of German Jewish immigrants in particular. In these small towns, Jewish citizens created networks of businesses and families that were part of a distinctive middle-class culture. This book offers enlightening case studies of the associations between Jewish communities in the big cities of the region, especially Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, and the smaller river towns that shared optimism about the Jewish future in America. Jews in these communities participated enthusiastically in ongoing dialogues concerning religious reform and unity, playing a crucial role in the development of American Judaism. The history of the Ohio River Valley includes the stories of German and East European Jewish immigrants in America, of the emergence of American Reform Judaism and the adaptation of tradition, and of small-town American Jewish culture.

Kentucky's first settlers brought with them a dedication to democracy and a sense of limitless hope about the future. Determined to participate in world progress in science, education, and manufacturing, Kentuckians wanted to make the United States a great nation. They strongly supported the War of 1812, and Kentucky emerged as a model of patriotism and military spirit. This book offers a new synthesis of the sixty years before the Civil War. The book explores this crucial but often overlooked period, finding that the early years of statehood were an era of great optimism and progress. Drawing on a wealth of primary and secondary sources, the book demonstrates that the eyes of the nation often focused on Kentucky, which was perceived as a leader among the states before the Civil War. Globally oriented Kentuckians were determined to transform the frontier into a network of communities exporting to the world market and dedicated to the new republic.

As the Civil War began, President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Henry Seward formed a most unlikely, but exceedingly successful foreign policy partnership. While functioning as the senior partner, Lincoln instituted a one-war policy as the cornerstone of US diplomacy, brilliantly articulated the international importance of preserving the nation’s republican experiment, linked freeing the slaves to the Union’s survival, and oversaw the North’s military efforts. By threatening war with any nation that intervened in the American conflict, Seward practiced a purposeful brinkmanship that was essential to precluding potentially decisive European aid to the Confederacy. The secretary of state combined these ongoing threats with timely compromises at crucial junctures, such as the Trent affair; joined Lincoln in the skillful use of public diplomacy aimed at both domestic and foreign audiences; and adeptly responded to Napoleon III’s intervention in Mexico. The US victory advanced the cause of republicanism and nationalism in the western world; it also enabled the United States to resume its imperial growth toward great power status. Seward played a formative role in that imperial growth. Following Lincoln’s assassination, he remained secretary of state during the Andrew Johnson administration. Over those four years, Seward purchased Alaska and outlined an elaborate agenda for US commercial and territorial expansion, an agenda that forecast with remarkable specificity US actions at the turn of the twentieth century.

In the years following the Revolutionary War, the young American nation was in a state of chaos. Citizens pleaded with government leaders to reorganize local infrastructures and heighten regulations, but economic turmoil, Native American warfare, and political unrest persisted. By 1784, one group of North Carolina frontiersmen could no longer stand the unresponsiveness of state leaders to their growing demands. This ambitious coalition of Tennessee Valley citizens declared their region independent from North Carolina, forming the state of Franklin. This book chronicles the history of this ill-fated movement from its origins in the early settlement of East Tennessee to its eventual violent demise. It investigates how this lost state failed so ruinously, examining its history and tracing the development of its modern mythology. The Franklin independence movement emerged from the shared desires of a powerful group of landed elite, yeoman farmers, and country merchants. Over the course of four years they managed to develop a functioning state government, court system, and backcountry bureaucracy. Cloaking their motives in the rhetoric of the American Revolution, the Franklinites aimed to defend their land claims, expand their economy, and eradicate the area's Native American population. They sought admission into the union as America's 14th state, but their secession never garnered support from outside the Tennessee Valley. Confronted by Native American resistance and the opposition of the North Carolina government, the state of Franklin incited a firestorm of partisan and Indian violence. Despite a brief diplomatic flirtation with the nation of Spain during the its final days, the state was never able to recover from the warfare, and Franklin collapsed in 1788. East Tennesseans now regard the lost state of Franklin as a symbol of rugged individualism and regional exceptionalism, but outside the region the movement has been largely forgotten.

Preeminent Kentucky reformer and women's rights advocate Madeline McDowell Breckinridge (1872–1920) was at the forefront of social change during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Breckinridge had a remarkably varied activist career that included roles in the promotion of public health, education, women's rights, and charity. Founder of the Lexington Civic League and Associated Charities, she successfully lobbied to create parks and playgrounds and to establish a juvenile court system in Kentucky. Breckinridge also became president of the Kentucky Equal Rights Association, served as vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and even campaigned across the country for the League of Nations. This book draws on newly discovered correspondence and rich personal interviews with her female associates to illuminate the fascinating life of this important Kentucky activist. Balancing Breckinridge's public reform efforts with her private concerns, it tells the story of her marriage to Desha Breckinridge, editor of the Lexington Herald, and how she used the match to her advantage by promoting social causes in the newspaper. The book also chronicles her ordeals with tuberculosis and amputation, and emotionally trying episodes of family betrayal and sex scandals. It describes how Breckinridge's physical struggles and personal losses transformed her from a privileged socialite into a selfless advocate for the disadvantaged. Later, as vice president of the National American Women Suffrage Association, she lobbied for Kentucky's ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote in 1920. While devoting much of her life to the woman suffrage movement on the local and national levels, Breckinridge also supported the antituberculosis movement, social programs for the poor, compulsory school attendance, and laws regulating child labor.

Kentucky distillers have produced bourbon and rye whiskeys for more than two centuries. Part I of this book examines the complexities associated with nineteenth-century distilling’s evolution from an artisanal craft practiced by farmers and millers to a large-scale mechanized industry that adopted increasingly refined production techniques. The change from waterpower to steam engines permitted the relocation of distilleries away from traditional sites along creeks or at large springs. Commercial-scale distilling was accompanied by increasing government taxes and oversight controls. Mechanized distilleries readily expanded production and increased their demand for labor, grains, cooperage, copper stills, and other metal fixtures. Improved transportation—turnpikes, steamboats, trains, and dams and locks—allowed distillers to extend their reach for grains and equipment while distributing their product to national and international markets. Industrial production produced large amounts of spent grains, or slop, which had to be disposed of by feeding it to livestock or dumping it in sinkholes and creeks. Industrialization also increased the risk of fire, explosions, personal injury, and livestock diseases. Overproduction during the last third of the nineteenth century, among other problems, forced many distilleries to stop production or close. The temperance movement eventually led to Prohibition, which was in effect nationwide from 1920 to 1933. A small number of distillers survived that period by making medicinal whiskey. Part II consists of two case studies that provide detailed information on the general process of mechanization and industrialization: the Henry McKenna Distillery in Nelson County, and James Stone’s Elkhorn Distillery in Scott County. Part III examines the process of claiming product identity through naming, copyright law, and the acknowledgment that tradition and heritage can be employed by contemporary distillers to market their whiskey. Distillers venerate the “old,” and reconstructing the past as a marketing strategy has demonstrated that the industry’s heritage resides on the landscape—much of it established in the nineteenth century in the form of historic buildings, traditional routes, distillery towns, and other features that can be conserved through historic preservation and utilized by contemporary whiskey makers.

Drawing on newly translated materials and previously overlooked primary sources, Randolph Paul Runyon explores the life and times of the Mentelles in this intriguing dual biography. He illustrates how the couple's origins and education gave them access to the higher strata of Bluegrass society even as their views on religion, politics, and culture kept them from feeling at home in America. They were intimates of statesman Henry Clay, and one of their daughters married into the Clay family, but like other immigrant families in the region, they struggled to survive. Through the years, they often reinvented themselves out of necessity. Their most famous venture was Mentelle's for Young Ladies, an intellectually rigorous school that attracted students from around the region and greatly influenced its most well-known pupil, Mary Todd Lincoln. Runyon reveals the Mentelles as eloquent chroniclers of crucial moments in Ohio and Kentucky history from the turn of the nineteenth century to the eve of the Civil War. They rankled at the baleful influence of conservative religion on the local college, the influence of whiskey on the local population, and the scandal of slavery in the land of liberty. This study sheds new light on a remarkable pair who not only bore witness to key events in early American history but also had a singular impact on the lives of their friends, their students, and members of their community.

Originally inhabited by Native American tribes, territorial Mississippi has a complex history rife with fierce contention. Since 1540, when Hernando de Soto of Spain journeyed across the Atlantic and became the first European to stumble across its borders, the territory has been the center of passionate international disagreements. After numerous boundary shifts, Mississippi was finally admitted as the twentieth state of the Union on December 10, 1817. This book does more than recount history; it explores the political and diplomatic situations that led to the formation and expansion of the Mississippi Territory. This extensively researched book details critical events in Mississippi's rich history, such as ongoing border violence, the arrest of infamous traitor Aaron Burr, and the bloody Creek War.

The “Kentucky Tragedy” was early America's best known true crime story. In 1825, Jereboam O. Beauchamp assassinated Kentucky attorney general Solomon P. Sharp. The murder, trial, conviction, and execution of the killer—as well as the suicide of his wife, Anna Cooke Beauchamp—fascinated Americans. The episode became the basis of dozens of novels and plays composed by some of the country's most esteemed literary talents, among them Edgar Allan Poe and William Gilmore Simms. This book peels away two centuries of myth to provide a more accurate account of the murder. It also reveals how Jereboam and Anna Beauchamp shaped the meaning and memory of the event by manipulating romantic ideals at the heart of early American society. Concocting a story in which Solomon Sharp had seduced and abandoned Anna, the couple transformed a sordid murder—committed because the Beauchamps believed Sharp to be spreading a rumor that Anna had had an affair with a family slave—into a maudlin tale of feminine virtue assailed, honor asserted, and a young rebel's revenge. This book reveals the true story behind the murder and demonstrates enduring influence of Romanticism in early America.