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  • As early as 1654, English and French explorers in the southern Appalachians reported seeing dark-skinned, brown- and blue-eyed, and European-featured people speaking broken Elizabethan English, living in cabins, tilling the land, smelting silver, practicing Christianity, and, most perplexing of all, claiming to be Portyghee. Declared free persons of color in the late 1700s by the English and Scottish-Irish immigrants, the Melungeons, as they were known, were driven off their lands and denied voting rights, education, and the right to judicial process. The law was enforced mercilessly and sometimes violently in the resoundingly successful effort to totally disenfranchise these earliest American settlers. SOFTBACK VERSION By Brent Kennedy
  • Doc, My Tiger's Got An Itch: The True Story of a Kentucky Hill Country Veterinarian Who Occasionally Runs Away With The Circus HARDBACK VERSION By John G. Martin
  • America is ready to remember and honor the men and women who courageously served the nation during World War II. To celebrate those brave souls and their families, and the spirit that carried them through our nation's darkest days, the Library of Congress has created a magnificent gift book. Themed around memories of Christmas during the war, I'll Be Home for Christmas: The Spirit of Christmas During World War II is a unique and handsomely packaged collection of poignant stories, correspondence, more than 100 photographs and illustrations, and diary excerpts from those who went off to war and those who kept the home fires burning. HARDBACK VERSION
  • This book captures the spirit of Christmas in 43 true stories by 39 authors. Thirty-five of the stories are set in Kentucky and the others are from neighboring states. All of these powerful and well-written stories emanate from the heart of Appalachia, and many attach themselves to your heart. This is a great Christmas gift book! SOFTBACK VERSION FULL COLOR INTERIOR
  • A Collection of essays, short stories, and poetry from writers, including Jesse Stuart, Billy C. Clark, James B. Goode, and Thomas D. Clark. SOFTBACK
  • Following World War I, our nation entered a decade of national prosperity. Businesses flourished, and the standard of living rose. Jobs were plentiful and Americans were better fed, clothed, and housed than they had ever been before. However, the prosperity of the roaring twenties did not filter down to the rural poor of Appalachia. When Jack Ellis was born to Lon and Dot Ellis in 1927, the family lived near Morehead, Kentucky in a dilapidated, leaky, rat-infested house with no screens on the windows and one room that had a dirt floor. By the time Jack entered grade school, America was mired in the Great Depression. During the 30s, his father was employed by the Civilian Conservation Corp. for several years, but his mother became discouraged and depressed after losing her teaching position in the Rowan County schools. By Jack D. Ellis
  • An Old-Fashioned Christmas: Decorations, Crafts, and Festive Foods.
  • Laced throughout the litany of letters on this celebratory alphabet book is the meaning of Christmas with an Appalachian twist. Exploring the whimsy and worship of Yuletide in the mountains, each letter captures a glimpse of the traditions, food, and frolicking shared by family and friends. Incorporating a legend about the animals around the manger, a program with angels announcing God's glory, and choirs softly singing carols, this A-to-Z book for all ages will become a new Christmas tradition for families who gather around the tree each December. By Francie Hall Illustrated by Kent Oehm
  • Lauren Gabriel spent many years of her childhood in foster homes, wishing her mother would come back for her and be the family she needs. Now twenty-years-old, she still longs for a place that she can truly call home. Her work as a cashier is unfulfilling, and at Christmas it’s unbearable with the songs and carols and chatter of Christmas that she hears throughout the day. By Donna VanLiere
  • A charming, heart-warming Christmas taleabout the power of family, tradition, and love. In 1875, Owen Thomas, a poor Welsh coal miner, falls in love with a beautiful London actress, Jessica Lavery. He builds her a cottage in his village, and enchants her with the promise of the holidays they'll share after they marry. According to his special Thomas family tradition, the Christmas tree must always be outside, where it can look up to God. Owen carves her an angel to go on top of their tree, with lavender eyes like hers, a token more meaningful to her than any engagement ring. When Jessica breaks off their romance, Owen, broken-hearted, wraps the angel in his mother's shawl and brings her to America. There, she looks down over five generations, witnessing peace and war, triumphs and tragedies, reminding all who see her that Christmas is the time when families and sweethearts can come together, laughter and goodwill can lighten even the heaviest burden, and magic fills the earth. By Jane Maas
  • If you were a Christmas tree, what kind of tree would you be? A mighty tree or a tiny tree? A city tree or a country tree? A tree with curious features or a tree made just for creatures? Voyaging from cities to plains and in renderings of things miniature to grand, Wendell and Florence Minor lead young readers on an imaginative journey across America in tribute to one of our most beloved symbols — the Christmas tree. By Wendell and Florence Minor  
  • Boxed Set: Five bestselling beautiful stories of love and faith ~
    • The Christmas Secret
    • The Christmas Promise
    • The Christmas Hope
    • The Christmas Blessing
    • The Christmas Shoes
    By Donna VanLiere  
  • Amid war and the fading dream of the Confederacy, a wounded soldier and a destitute widow discover the true meaning of Christmas — and of sacrificial love. By Tamera Alexander
  • Cruelly Murdered: The Murder of Mary Magdalene Pitts and Other Kentucky True Crime Stories: In this follow-up to Murder in Old Kentucky, Keven McQueen presents detailed and thoroughly researched true crime stories from Kentucky history, spanning in time from the state's early history to the Roaring Twenties. The stories include the case of the governor's son who was tried for murder five tmes and eventually pardoned by his father; Edward Hawkins, a murderer on the move with a pronounced taste for bigamy; the 1883 shooting of a promising young Louisville artist; the infamous 1887 murder of Jennie Bowman, a Louisville maid, by two burglars; and the abuse and murder of three-year-old Mary Magdalene Pitts of Greenup County by her father and a housekeeper, still one of Kentucky's most notorious crimes. SOFTBACK By Keven McQueen
  • Morehead Memories recalls the struggle of a city and a county to advance from a raw, violent, feud filled region into a modern educational, commercial, cultural and medical center in Eastern Kentucky. The author uses interviews, documented research and personal memories to vividly tell the story of the people, places, institutions and events through which this marvelous transformation was accomplished. HARDBACK By Jack D. Ellis
  • Growing Up in the Last Small Town: A West Virginia Memoir is a humorous and poignant account of Bob Barnett, a bad student and undersized athlete coming of age in the 1950’s, but it is also the story of all of us who grew up in small towns across America between 1940 and 1960. It was a time of simple pleasures that included shedding winter coats on the first day of spring, playing baseball until dark, watching four-hour children’s matinees on Saturday, and breaking plates in the town dump, our favorite playground. It was a time when we wrote term papers, ate fish sandwiches at the Fireman’s Carnival, cheered our high school teams, and lived for soak hops and dances –a time when getting the right date for the prom was more important than the election of the president. The story is set in the unincorporated pottery town of Newell, West Virginia and captures the rhythm of life in small towns that we thought would never change. But change came quickly. Television became a staple of modern life in the 1950s offering Elvis, the evening news, and a vivid view of our changing world. School consolidations robbed the towns of their souls, supermarkets eliminated the need for corner grocery stores, and the closing of mills and factories brought an end to small towns as we knew them. The generation whose story is told in this book grew up in the last small town in America. SOFTBACK By Bob Barnett
  • The Civil War affected the daily lives of almost everyone in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, a slave holding state that chose not to secede from the United States. Here are the untold stories of lesser known combatants or the folks back home who suffered in so many ways from the ravages of war. Seventeen chapters range in topics from interviews with former slaves to an examination of Mary Todd Lincoln's family's military involvement in the war. SOFTBACK By Marshall Myers
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    Border Wars of the Upper Ohio Valley is the story of the Trans-Allegheny movement in the quarter-century from 1769-1794. It embraces the area of the present United States from western Pennsylvania to the Mississippi, and from the Great Lakes southward into Tennessee. The story of this westward movement begins with the emigration of the Zane family from the South Branch of the Potomac River, from their home near Moorefield, in present Hardy County, West Virginia, to the mouth of Wheeling Creek in the panhandle of that state, and concludes with Anthony Wayne’s victory over the confederated Indian tribes at Fallen Timbers. William Hintzen’s book brings back the days of Daniel Boone, the Zane family (founders of Wheeling), Simon Kenton, Lewis Wetzel (Death Wind, as the Indians knew him), the 1777 siege of Fort Henry, the Girty brothers, Sam McCo9lloch, Betty Zane’s dash for gunpowder, the remarkable Wetzel family, Sam Brady, George Rogers Clark and Mad Anthony Wayne’s final victory at Fallen Timbers. By William Hintzen
  • In this family history, “Raft Tide and Railroad: How We Lived and Died — Collected Memories and Stories of an Appalachian Family and Its Seventh Son,” Appalachian author, poet, and editor Dr. Edwina Pendarvis, was guided by sage advice from a grandmother, Jet Johnson, known only to her through family stories and photographs. Not long before Johnson was murdered, she asked one of her sons to note the strength of a bundle of twigs – as opposed to an individual twig – and see it as a metaphor for family strength – a metaphor originated by an earlier Appalachian – the warrior Tecumseh. In “Raft Tide and Railroad,” the author has preserved her family’s history and recognized its strength through accounts that span seven generations of experiences in Virginia, Kentucky, and West Virginia from the early 1800s to the present. SOFTBACK VERSION By Edwina Pendarvis
  • 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
  • This is a collection of folk tales, or stories based on traditional tales which originated in the Old World before America became a nation. They came to this country in the memories of the settlers and were passed on to younger generations through the oral tradition. However, as the immigrants to America began to change and develop into Americans, so did the characters in the folk tales. SOFTBACK Compiled & Edited by Loyal Jones
  • "In Kentucky Memories: Reflections of Rowan County, Jack Ellis has demonstrated an awareness of the important role of local history. During the past century-and-a-half, the human population of this amoeba-like area, carved out of Fleming and Morgan Counties, has matured into an Appalachian folk, cultural, economic, educational, and medical center. Literally scores of people have contributed both positively and negatively to the history of this community, and each of their acts in some form or another should remain as a record of their presence and activities. In the same way, every important human act documenting the past should should be passed on to future generations as a foundation for its presence and actions." — Dr. Thomas D. Clark HARDCOVER By Jack D. Ellis
  • No part of American history is more exciting than the 1770s, when Europeans first settled west of the Appalachian mountains in the land now known as Kentucky. Simon Kenton’s story is synonymous with the story of that era. His life of excitement, adventure, and danger on the frontier made him one of the leading heroes of that time and, eventually a Kentucky legend. By Thomas D. Clark
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  • Since the earliest European settlers arrived in the area over two centuries ago, Kentuckians have felt a deep attachment to the land. From subsistence farmers in eastern Kentucky to wealthy horse owners in the central Bluegrass, land was, and continues to be, the state's greatest source of economic growth. It is also a point of nostalgia for a people devoted to tradition, a characteristic that has enriched Kentucky's culture but has proven detrimental to 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 century that promises to bring rapid changes to the land and the people of Kentucky. By Thomas D. Clark
  • The region that ultimately became and remains today the South was originally a land of forests. Most of the species of trees that were native to North America flourished in the the South. For more than three centuries after the coming of the white man the southern forests gave way to agriculture and to the ravages of the lumber industry. But in the twentieth century, and largely since World War II, southerners and their industries have turned to controlled forestry and tree farming as being among the region’s most rewarding enterprises. Thus the recent decades have seen a remarkable new “greening of the South” By Thomas D. Clark
  • In the fall of 1829, young Robert Wilmot Scott rode away from Frankfort Kentucky on a trip that would take him through nine states. His journal entries about those travels present a vivid picture of Jacksonian America and of the prominent people of that era. Excellent pen portraits of James and Dolly Madison, James Monroe, John Marshall, James Buchanan, Sam Houston, Edward Everett, John C. Calhoun, John Randolph, John Quincy Adams, and others show Scott to be a famous Webster-Hayne debate; he gives a rich account of that discussion and its personalities. By Thomas D. Clark
  • When Thomas D. Clark was hired to teach history at the University of Kentucky in 1931, he began a career that would span nearly three-quarters of a century and would profoundly change not only the history department and the university but the entire Commonwealth. His still-definitive History of Kentucky(1937) was one of more than thirty books he would write or edit that dealt with Kentucky, the South, and the American frontier. By Thomas D. Clark
  • In 1990, the Kentucky General Assembly honored Thomas D. Clark by declaring him Kentucky’s Historian Laureate for life, at which time Governor Brereton Jones described him as “Kentucky’s greatest treasure.” Thomas D. Clark of Kentucky; An Uncommon Life in the Commonwealth is a celebration and exploration of the unparalleled life and career of a man who has both recorded the history and shaped the future of his adopted home state. Born on July 14th 1903, in Louisville, Mississippi, to a cotton farmer and a public school teacher, Clark was the oldest of seven children. Before enrolling in high school at age eighteen, he worked on a farm, in a sawmill, and as a cabin boy and deck hand on a dredge boat. After attending the University of Mississippi and earning graduate degrees at the University of Kentucky and Duke University, Clark joined the faculty of the University of Kentucky in 1931. There he chaired the history department from 1942 until 1965, influencing the lives of thousands of students.  
  • The mountain is a lonely place. Welcome to Sourwood, a small Kentucky town inhabited by men and women unique and yet eerily familiar. Among its joyful and tragic citizens we meet the crafty, spirited Caleb and his curious younger brother; Pearl, a suspected witch, and her sheltered daughter, Thanie; superstitious Eli; and the doomed orphan Girty. In Sourwood, the mountain is both a keeper of secrets and an imposing, isolating presence, shaping the lives of all who live in its shadow. Strong in both the voice and sensibilities of Appalachia, the stories in Miss America Kissed Caleb are at turns heartbreaking and hilarious. In the title story, young Caleb turns over his hard-earned dime to the war effort when he receives a coaxing kiss from Miss America, who sweeps into Sourwood by train, "pretty as a night moth." Caleb and his brother share in the thrills and uncertainties of growing up, making an accidental visit to a brothel in "Fourth of July" and taming a "high society" pooch in "The Jimson Dog." These stories invoke a place and a time that have long passed―a way of living nearly extinct―yet the beauty of the language and the truth revealed in the characters' everyday lives continue to resonate with modern readers. By Billy C. Clark
  • Goodbye Kate, Billy C. Clark’s sixth novel, is based in part on a mule he once owned. In the novel, Kate is found far back in the hills by a lonely country boy named Isaac Warfield. He lives close enough to Tatesburg, the nearest town, to walk to school there, but it’s a small town, and his home is isolated. Isaac has graduated from the little country school he has attended and the other members of his class will be moving on to another school, or to no school at all. He won’t have much contact with his friends anymore, and the nearest neighbor, a money-hungry man named Simm Johns, has no children and is “mean as a striped snake.” Isaac finds Kate when he goes back into the hills to pick some blackberries for his mother. The little mule is apparently as lonely as Isaac is, and she adopts him and follows him home – as far as the pine grove above the house, that is. By Billy C. Clark
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