Weird Kentucky: Your Travel Guide to Kentucky's Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets (Weird)
by Jeffrey Scott Holland
from Sterling
"Best Travel Series of the Year 2006!"—Booklist
What’s weird around here?
That’s a question Mark Moran and Mark Sceurman have enjoyed asking for years—and their offbeat sense of curiosity led them to create the bestselling phenomenon, Weird N.J. Now the weirdness has spread throughout key locales in the U.S. Each fun and intriguing volume offers more than 250 illustrated pages of places where tourists usually don’t venture—it’s chock-full of oddball curiosities, ghostly places, local legends, crazy characters, cursed roads, and peculiar roadside attractions. What’s NOT shockingly odd here: that every previously published Weird book has become a bestseller in its region.
Big Bone Lick: The Cradle of American Paleontology
by Stanley Hedeen
from University Press of Kentucky
Shawnee legend tells of a herd of huge bison rampaging through the Ohio Valley, laying waste to all in their path. To protect the tribe, a deity slew these great beasts with lightning bolts, finally chasing the last giant buffalo into exile across the Wabash River, never to trouble the Shawnee again. The source of this legend was a peculiar salt lick in present-day northern Kentucky, where giant fossilized skeletons had for centuries lain undisturbed by the Shawnee and other natives of the region.
In 1739, the first Europeans encountered this fossil site, which eventually came to be known as Big Bone Lick. The site drew the attention of all who heard of it, including George Washington, Daniel Boone, Benjamin Franklin, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, and especially Thomas Jefferson. The giant bones immediately cast many scientific and philosophical assumptions of the day into doubt, and they eventually gave rise to the study of fossils for biological and historical purposes.
Big Bone Lick: The Cradle of American Paleontology recounts the rich history of the fossil site that gave the world the first evidence of the extinction of several mammalian species, including the American mastodon. Big Bone Lick has played many roles: nutrient source, hallowed ground, salt mine, health spa, and a rich trove of archaeological and paleontological wonders. Natural historian Stanley Hedeen presents a comprehensive narrative of Big Bone Lick from its geological formation forward, explaining why the site attracted animals, regional tribespeople, European explorers and scientists, and eventually American pioneers and presidents.
Big Bone Lick is the history of both a place and a scientific discipline: it explores the infancy and adolescence of paleontology from its humble and sometimes humorous beginnings. Hedeen combines elements of history, geology, politics, and biology to make Big Bone Lick a valuable historical resource as well as the compelling tale of how a collection of fossilized bones captivated a young nation.
James Archambeault's Historic Kentucky
by James Archambeault
from University Press of Kentucky
"Landscape photography, in a time such as ours when the disappearance of subjects can be unnaturally accelerated, thus becomes extraordinarily poignant and telling. James Archambeault, roaming through Kentucky, photographing its human and natural landscapes, has been working as both a historian and an elegist."--Wendell Berry, from the foreword
Renowned photographer James Archambeault has the rare ability to capture the historic, archival, and artistic aspects of his photographic subjects. His award-winning craft is evident in the careful selection of time, season, and subjects in his beloved Kentucky. In his new book, he preserves the landscapes, buildings, and sights of old Kentucky as many of them fall into neglect, become irreversibly altered, or disappear completely.
In addition to his text on the early settlement of Kentucky, Archambeault explains the historic and cultural significance of each the full-color photographs. Some of his subjects are well-preserved historic landmarks, such as White Hall in Madison County and Federal Hill Mansion, also known as "My Old Kentucky Home," in Bardstown. Others concern the daily life and work of Kentuckians, such as a Sunday afternoon baptism on Jessamine Creek or friends sharing their thoughts on a warm February day in Sharpsburg, Bath County.
The passing of a different way of life echoes in photographs of a drive-in theater, mom-and-pop grocery stores, covered bridges, and old farm houses. Archambeault depicts the friction between the historic and future Kentucky, such as grain silos from the early 1930s within view of a new subdivision in Shelby County, or the Joseph Ewing log cabin in Scott County standing on the site of a future industrial park.
James Archambeault's Historic Kentucky is a photographic elegy to the scenic treasures of our culture. Including a foreword by Wendell Berry, the book reminds us of our responsibility to serve as stewards for Kentucky's rich history and historic places.
Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (An Owl Book)
by John Mack Faragher
from Owl Books
The legend of the American frontier is largely the legend of a single individual, Daniel Boone, who looms over our folklore like a giant. Boone figures in other traditions as well: Goethe held him up as the model of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "natural man," and Lord Byron devoted several stanzas of his epic poem Don Juan to the frontiersman, calling Boone "happiest of mortals any where." But folklore is not history, and we are fortunate to have a reliable and factual life of Boone through the considerable efforts of John Mack Faragher. The contradictory admirer of Indians who participated in their destruction, the slaveholder who cherished liberty, the devoted family man who prized solitude and would disappear into the woods for years at a time--the real Boone is far more interesting than the mythical image, and in this book we finally catch sight of him.
In the first and most reliable biography of Daniel Boone in more than fifty years, award-winning historian Faragher brilliantly portrays America’s famous frontier hero. Drawing from popular narrative, the public record, scraps of documentation from Boone’s own hand, and a treasure of reminiscence gathered by nineteenth-century antiquarians, Faragher uses the methods of new social history to create a portrait of the man and the times he helped shape. Blending themes from a much vitalized Western and frontier history with the words and ideas of ordinary people, Faragher has produced a book that will stand as the definitive life of Daniel Boone for decades to come, and one that illuminates the frontier world of Boone like no other.
The Thin Thirty
by Shannon P. Ragland
from Set Shot Press
Kentucky's new football coach in 1962, Charlie Bradshaw, a Bear Bryant acolyte, put his team through a brutal conditioning and practice regiment, thinning the squad from eighty-eight players to just thirty. Over the course of the fateful year, the players would survive not just brutality on the football field, but sex and gambling scandals off it that involved Rock Hudson and the fixing of a Kentucky game. Based on extensive research, including over 100 interviews, The Thin Thirty is a detailed account of this fateful season, providing intimate portraits of the key participants, from the coaches to the players to the corrupting predators off the field. This is the true story of a football team that overcame the darkest of scandals to become forever known as legends. They were the Thin Thirty.
Kentucky Ancestry: A Guide to Genealogical and Historical Research
by Roseann Reinemuth Hogan
from Ancestry.com
Kentucky Ancestry is the most extensive available guide for Kentucky genealogical and historical research! This genealogical gem outlines the holdings of the Kentucky State Archives and Kentucky's libraries, courthouses, universities, and historical organizations! Author Hogan's experience and knowledge will help you achieve efficient and successful research in Kentucky - a state that played an key role in the United States' western expansion! If your research has led you to Kentucky, don't miss out on this essential resource! 400 Pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2, Softbound ISBN 0-916489-49-3
Kentucky Bourbon: The Early Years of Whiskeymaking
by Henry G. Crowgey
from University Press of Kentucky
Bourbon whiskey is perhaps Kentucky’s most distinctive product. Despite bourbon’s prominence in the social and economic life of the Bluegrass state, many myths and legends surround its origins. In Kentucky Bourbon, Henry C. Crowgey claims that distilled spirits and pioneer settlement went hand in hand; Isaac Shelby, the state’s first governor, was among Kentucky’s pioneer distillers. Crowgey traces the drink’s history from its beginnings as a cottage industry to steam-based commercial operations in the period just before the Civil War. From “spirited” camp meetings, to bourbon’s use as a medium of exchange for goods and services, to the industry’s coming of age in the mid-nineteenth century, the story of Kentucky bourbon is a fascinating chapter in the state’s early history.
How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky From Daniel Boone to Henry Clay
by Stephen Aron
from The Johns Hopkins University Press
"A first-rate piece of work and a fine read." -- Alan Taylor, University of California, Davis
"This excellent history of early Kentucky resonates with the most important questions in the history of the early republic, frontier, and economic development. One of the book's great strengths is its 'genre-busting' quality, taking up ethnohistory and settlement history in the same narrative." -- John Mack Faragher, Yale University
Eighteenth-century Kentucky was a place where Indian and European cultures collided -- and, surprisingly, coincided. But this mixed world did not last, and it eventually gave way to nineteenth-century commercial and industrial development. How the West Was Lost tracks the overlapping conquest, colonization, and consolidation of the trans-Appalachian frontier. Not a story of paradise lost, this is a book about possibilities lost. It focuses on the common ground between Indians and backcountry settlers which was not found, the frontier customs that were not perpetuated, the lands that were not distributed equally, the slaves who were not emancipated, the agrarian democracy that was not achieved, and the millennium that did not arrive. Seeking to explain why these dreams were not realized, Stephen Aron shows us what did happen during Kentucky's tumultuous passage from Daniel Boone's world to Henry Clay's.
Entertaining with Bluegrass Winners Cookbook: New Recipes and Menus from Kentucky's Legendary Horse Farms
by Edward L Bowen
from Eclipse Press
Kentucky hospitality is showcased in this updated edition of the beloved cookbook that has had 20 printings and sales of more than 100,000 copies. From a formal winter dinner to a post Kentucky Derby brunch, Bluegrass hostesses share their recipes and family traditions for every season and occasion. Includes farm histories written by racing historian Edward L. Bowen and more than 100 color photos.
Tales from Kentucky Doctors
by William Lynwood Montell
from University Press of Kentucky
The nearly 350 humorous, heartwarming, and sometimes tragic accounts presented in William Lynwood Montell’s latest book, Tales from Kentucky Doctors, offer an unusual perspective on the culture and tradition of Kentucky health-care practice.
From the laughable to the laudable, Tales from Kentucky Doctors present illuminating portraits of doctors and patients, drawing stories from physicians with lifetimes of experience serving Kentucky families. In chapter 2, doctors recall the successes and failures that shaped their early careers. For Dr. Baretta R. Casey of Hazard, becoming a doctor was a difficult journey. Already married and with a child, Casey enrolled in college at age thirty, later completed medical school, and began a successful career as a family practitioner in the 1990s.
Though patient visitations and doctors’ prescriptions are recorded on account ledgers, personal relationships and memories are not part of medical records. The section “Personal Practice” gives a glimpse of the intimate relationships doctors form with their communities. “I doubt that any individual was nearer to the family than the family doctor,” Dr. W. L. Tyler says in one story. For many towns, family physicians were heroes. Dr. James S. Brashear relates the challenges of practicing in Central City, a coal mining town, recalling an incident in which he saved the lives of two miners.
Handed down to Montell in the oral tradition, the tales presented in this collection represent every part of the state. Personal experiences, humorous anecdotes, and local legends make it a fascinating panorama of Kentucky physicians and of the communities they served.
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