Wayne Onkst, Chairman of the JSF Board of Directors, was here today to sign copies of his book, Presidential Visits to Kentucky: 1819-2017, that will be distributed to underserved high school and public libraries throughout Kentucky. The distribution project is made possible by a generous [...]
The JSF received a $5,000 grant from the Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels to distribute copies of Presidential Visits to Kentucky: 1819-2017 by Wayne Onkst to underserved public libraries and high schools throughout Kentucky. This year, the HOKC will award $3.1 million in grants supporting [...]
No small target at six-foot-two, young Sam Houston wasn’t thinking about getting hit. He was thinking about getting even. Running through a hail of musket balls, spears, and arrows, he and his fellow soldiers of the elite 39th U.S. infantry unit sprinted toward an [...]
For those who loved “The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek,” author Kim Michele Richardson offers another fine evocation of the often cruel conditions of rural Appalachia in the last century and a powerful portrait of the courageous women there who fought against ignorance, misogyny, [...]
In the spring of 1781, during the American war for independence from Great Britain, redcoat troops arrived in upland Carolina and brought terror to Elizabeth Jackson and her sons. Elizabeth’s youngest son, Andrew, though barely fourteen years of age, hated their presence—and quickly learned [...]
Throughout the 1700s and 1800s, Americans were afflicted with a case of what John Steinbeck called “westering and westering.” During the early 1840s, two specific accounts focused the attention of restless Americans on the far West. John C. Fremont led a U.S. Army Survey [...]
From colonial beginnings until early in the twentieth century, one-room schools played an important role in Eastern Kentucky education. These tiny schools that dotted the hills and valleys were, collectively, a salvation to a region recovering from the Civil War and, later, the Great [...]
Greenup County, located in northeast Kentucky, lies approximately halfway between Ashland, Kentucky, and Portsmouth, Ohio. It is a land of wooded hills and clear, fast-moving streams that empty into the Ohio River, which forms the county’s northern border. The land surface ranges from rich [...]
In “The Taking of Jemima Boone: Colonial Settlers, Tribal Nations, And The Kidnap That Shaped America,” Matthew Pearl explores the little-known true story of the kidnapping of the daughter of the legendary pioneer Daniel Boone and the dramatic aftermath that rippled across the nation. On [...]
The wisest man I ever knew—we called him Zayde, born 1903, Minsk, Belarus—once told me a story of a man on a train going from coast to coast. The train had no dining car. One stop was planned at a half-way point. There at [...]
