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Presents the history of the exploration, settlement, and development of the vast mountain empire encompassed by several eastern Kentucky counties that pays attention to Civil War sites in the area.
For subsistence farmers in eastern Kentucky, wealthy horse owners in the central Bluegrass, and tobacco growers in Western Kentucky, land was, and continues to be, one of the commonwealth's greatest sources of economic growth. It is also a source of nostalgia for a people devoted to tradition, a characteristic that has significantly influenced Kentucky's culture, sometimes to the detriment of education and development. As timely now as when it was first published, Thomas D. Clark's classic history of agrarianism prepares readers for a new era that promises to bring rapid change to the land and the people of Kentucky.
Hazard, Kentucky is the setting for this historical story enhanced with some fiction, amazingly well told by author Wayne Combs, the great grandson of Bad Tom Smith. "Bad Tom" Smith was a notorious and murderous character in the late 1800s and as a result of his misdeeds was hanged in the town square for all to see. Still, there is more to a man than his public reputation, Bad Tom Smith was also a family man. This fast paced and realistic book will fill the reader in on many little-known facts, yet told in a storytelling fashion for enjoyable reading. But watch out, many of Americans have roots in Kentucky! You might find your own ties to this infamous character!
"By closely studying the strategic blend of land ownership, subsistence agriculture, and commerce, Weise reveals how white male farmers in Floyd County attempted to achieve and preserve patriarchal authority and independence - and how this household localism laid the foundation for the region's development during the industrial era. By shifting attention from the actions of industrialists to those of local residents, he reconciles contradictory views of antebellum Appalachia and offers a new understanding of the region's history and its people."--Jacket.
The Hatfield-McCoy feud, the entertaining subject of comic strips, popular songs, movies, and television, has long been a part of American folklore and legend. Ironically, the extraordinary endurance of the myth that has grown up around the Hatfields and McCoys has obscured the consideration of the feud as a serious historical event. In this study, Altina Waller tells the real story of the Hatfields and McCoys and the Tug Valley of West Virginia and Kentucky, placing the feud in the context of community and regional change in the era of industrialization. Waller argues that the legendary feud was not an outgrowth of an inherently violent mountain culture but rather one manifestation of a contest for social and economic control between local people and outside industrial capitalists -- the Hatfields were defending community autonomy while the McCoys were allied with the forces of industrial capitalism. Profiling the colorful feudists "Devil Anse" Hatfield, "Old Ranel" McCoy, "Bad" Frank Phillips, and the ill-fated lovers Roseanna McCoy and Johnse Hatfield, Waller illustrates how Appalachians both shaped and responded to the new economic and social order.
The Hatfield-McCoy feud of the 1880s and some time thereafter is one of the noted stories of folklore in America. Today the causes of that family and friends war between the Hatfields and the McCoys will be considered-the events which led up to the tragedy. There were many causes, an accumulation of things, which finally touched off the feud, or private war, which it actually was, between two determined families. First cause I think can be attributed to the very natures of those concerned. Both families were people of nerve because blood of British origin pulsed in their veins. That blood bespoke stubborn resistance and unflinching determination, an unwavering set. Came the Civil War of 1861...
This volume preserves the public papers and letters from the five-year period when Lawrence W. Wetherby was governor of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Relatively little of this material has been available heretofore to the general public. And its inaccessibility may explain why the Wetherby administration has yet to be fully appreciated even by historians and political scientists. The years 1950 through 1955 offered problems and opportunities that made being governor both a challenge and a joy. It was a period of economic growth fostered by the artificial stimulus of the Korean War, and sudden economic readjustment when the war ended, that resulted in financial problems for Kentucky's governm...
Assembles contributions from thirty-nine leading historians of the American Civil War into a coherent attempt to assess the war's impact on American society
The West Virginia mine war of 1920-21, a major civil insurrection of unusual brutality on both sides, even by the standards of the coal fields, involved thousands of union and nonunion miners, state and private police, militia, and federal troops. Before it was over, three West Virginia counties were in open rebellion, much of the state was under military rule, and bombers of the U.S. Army Air Corps had been dispatched against striking miners.The origins of this civil war were in the Draconian rule of the coal companies over the fiercely proud miners of Appalachia. It began in the small railroad town of Matewan when Mayor C. C. Testerman and Police Chief Sid Hatfield sided with striking mine...