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 Depression. In the nineteenth century, makeshift schools were located within walking distance of a few families who could pay the teacher. By the early twentieth [...]

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 river bottoms to rolling hills with beautiful forests of oak, maple, hickory, ash, and pine covering veins of coal and iron ore.  It is home [...]

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 a quiet midsummer day in 1776, weeks after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, thirteen-year-old Jemima Boone and her friends Betsy and Fanny Callaway [...]

Fewer words in the English language are more glibly uttered and more misunderstood than the word “history.” American history rests squarely upon a local base. Thomas Jefferson theorized that what happens at the local level of society is more important to the individual than what happens at the national or international level. Kentucky is divided into one hundred and twenty counties, and scores of towns, cities, and crossroad communities. [...]