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 ... More

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.