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In 1963, Harry M. Caudill published his now classic account of the reckless, deliberate despoliation of the Appalachian Plateau, Night Comes to the Cumberlands. Thirteen years later, in The Watches of the Night, Caudill continued the heartbreaking story of an incredibly rich land inhabited by a grindingly poor people whose problems, despite state and local aid and an unprecedented boom in coal, had worsened: the land was being stripped more rapidly than ever; the people’s traditional relationship with the land was being uprooted, and their old customs eliminated by standardization Both a narrative history and a polemic against greed and waste, The Watches of the Night hammers at “the profligacy growing out of the persistent myth of superabundance.” The author ponders an even darker future if the cycle of boom and bust is not broken. He writes: “Americans have never understood or respected the finely textured, little-hill terrain of the Cumberland Plateau.” Neither the farmers nor the miners who followed the early pioneers saw it as a place cherish. Through decades that have lengthened to nearly two centuries the land has fought back, sometimes with savage floods and always with persistent efforts to reforest. “But now times runs out and our “inexhaustible” resources have turned finite….The Kentucky Cumberlands are many things, but most of all they are a warning.” By Harry M. Caudill -
"God knew that it would take brave and sturdy people to survive in these beautiful but rugged hills. So He sent us His very strongest men and women." So begins the heartwarming story of Verna Mae and her father, Isom B. ""Kitteneye"" Slone, an extradordinay personal family history set in the hills around Caney Creek in Knott County, Kentucky. SOFTBACK VERSION By Verna Mae Slone -
A fictionalized account of the life of Jennie Sellards Wiley, who spent a year as an Indian captive in Kentucky and eventually escaped and returned to her husband in Virginia. SOFTBACK VERSION By Arville Wheeler -
By Allan Eckert -
The Winning of America Series: Book 2 of 6 For over two hundred years no Indian force in America was so powerful and feared as the Iroquois League. Throughout two thirds of this continent, the cry of "The Iroquois are coming!" was enough to demoralize entire tribes. But these Iroquois occupied and controlled a vast wilderness empire which beckoned like a precious gem to foreign powers. France and England secured toeholds and suddenly each was claiming as its own this land of the Iroquois. Alliance with the Indians was the key; whichever power controlled them could destroy the other. Wilderness Empire is the gripping narrative of the eighteenth-century struggle of these two powers to win for themselves the allegiance of the Indians in a war for territorial dominance, yet without letting these Indians know that the prize of the war would be this very Iroquois land. It is the story of English strength hamstrung by incredible incompetence, of French power sapped by devastating corruption. It is the story of the English, Indian and French individuals whose lives intertwine in the greatest territorial struggle in American history--the French and Indian War. SOFTBACK & HARDBACK By Allan Eckert -
“Wit, Wisdom and Other Stuff” is a compilation of 125 commentaries. He is a former reporter for The Associated Press and for newspapers in Ironton, Ohio, Ashland, Ky. and Huntington, W.Va. Keith Kappes is a retired university vice president who returned to community journalism to be publisher of the Morehead News Group for six years. Two years before this book project, he wrote and published “The View from my Keyboard." SOFTBACK VERSION By Keith Kappes
