When Franklin D. Roosevelt was sworn in as president, the South was unmistakably the most disadvantaged part of the nation. The region's economy was the weakest, its educational level the lowest, its politics the most rigid, and its laws and social mores the most racially slanted. Moreover, the region was prostrate from the effects of the Great Depression.Roosevelt's New Deal effected significant changes on the southern landscape, challenging many traditions and laying the foundations for subsequent alterations in the southern way of life. At the same time, firmly entrenched values and institutions militated against change and blunted the impact of federal programs.In The South and the New Deal, Roger Biles examines the New Deal's impact on the rural and urban South, its black and white citizens, its poor, and its politics. He shows how southern leaders initially welcomed and supported the various New Deal measures but later opposed a continuation or expansion of these programs because they violated regional convictions and traditions. Nevertheless, Biles concludes, the New Deal, coupled with the domestic effects of World War II, set the stage for a remarkable postwar transformation in the affairs of the region.The post-World War II Sunbelt boom has brought Dixie more fully into the national mainstream. To what degree did the New Deal disrupt southern distinctiveness? Biles answers this and other questions and explores the New Deal's enduring legacy in the region.

The first book of its kind, Putting Folklore to Use provides guidance to folklorists but also informs practitioners in other fields about how to use folklore studies to augment their own studies. How can acting like a folklore fieldworker help a teacher reduce inter-group stereotyping and increase student's self-esteem? How can adopting a folklore fieldworker's point of view when interviewing patients help practitioners render health care more effectively? How can using folklore research help rural communities survive and thrive?Thirteen folklorists provide answers to these and other questions and demonstrate the many ways folklore can be put to use. Their essays, commissioned for this volume and edited by Michael Owen Jones, apply the methods and insights of modern folklore research to thirteen different professions and areas of practical concern. The authors, all of whom have themselves put folklore to use in the fields they describe, consider applications in detail and explain how folkloristic concepts and techniques can enhance the work of various professions. They explore applications in such areas as museums, aiding the homeless, environmental planning, art therapy, designing public spaces, organization development, tourism, the public sector, aging, and creating an occupation's image.In an extensive introduction to the volume, Jones provides an overview of applied folkloristics that defines the field, surveys its history in the United States, and scrutinizes its basic issues and premises. Part I of the book shows how to promote learning, problem solving, and cultural conservation through folklore and its study. Part II deals with folklorists helping to improve the quality of life. Part III reveals folklore's role in enhancing identity and community.

Black college presidents in the era of segregation walked a tightrope. They were expected to educate black youth without sufficient state and federal funding. Yet in the African American community they were supposed to represent power and influence and to be outspoken advocates of civil rights, despite the continual risk of offending the white politicians on whom they were dependent for funding. The dilemmas they faced in balancing these conflicting demands have never been fully examined. Gerald Smith's study of the long-time president of Kentucky State College helps fill that void.From 1929 to 1962, Rufus Ballard Atwood served as president of Kentucky State. As chief administrator of the state's foremost black institution, he worked closely with black educational organizations and was often chosen by whites to represent the African American community on various boards and commissions. These appointments gave him access to the state's political and educational power structure, and Atwood proved to be a skilled diplomat; but his influence was frequently at risk.In his ground-breaking study, Smith examines Atwood's political relationships with state officials and his efforts to improve education for African Americans in Kentucky and the nation. He also appraises Atwood's contributions to Kentucky State and his relationship with faculty and students, and evaluates his contributions to the civil rights movement in Kentucky. Most important, Smith compares Atwood's style of leadership and the circumstances he confronted in Kentucky with those of black college presidents in other southern states.A Black Educator in the Segregated South offers an important look at a complex role played out by a remarkable man in an era of change and conflict.

The "State Line Country" of this book is a rugged area of small farms on the Kentucky-Tennessee border. Historically the area has had a homicide rate more than ten times the national average.In this gripping and penetrating study of violence and death in the State Line Country, Lynwood Montell examines the local historical and social conditions, as well as the prevailing attitudes and values, that gave rise and support to rowdy behavior and homicidal acts from the Civil War to the 1930s. The area fostered, he thinks, a culture of violence. Drawing from vivid oral accounts, which he recorded from present-day residents, Montell describes more than fifty killings that took place in the area, locating them against a background of farming, moonshining, and sawmilling activities common in that country. In addition to reconstructing the homicides, he analyzes their key features, including the circumstances under which they took place, the relationships of the persons involved, the presence of precipitating factors (such as deadly weapons and alcohol) in the culture, and attitudes toward law enforcement officers and the courts.This close examination of homicide in the State Line Country, which views the tradition from regional and national perspectives, adds a significant dimension to the study of homicide in the South.

A major phenomenon in the post-World War II world is the rise of Japan as a leading international economic and industrial power. This advance began with American aid in rebuilding the nation after the war, but it has now seen Japan rival and even outstrip the United States on several fronts. The relations between the two powers and the impact that they have on economic and political factors during the postwar years are the focus of this important book. The editors, Akira Iriye and Warren I. Cohen, themselves noted authorities on Asian affairs, have gathered here contributions from a distinguished group of American and Japanese scholars. The resulting collection represents a unique blend of viewpoints from each side of the American-Japanese relationship.

This is the first full-scale biography of Gwendolyn Brooks, one of America's major poets. George E. Kent, a longtime friend and literary associate of the poet in Chicago, was given exclusive access to Brooks' early notebooks, which she kept from the age of seven. Kent also interviewed Brooks, her mother, and other family members in Chicago and elsewhere. He scoured records and correspondence with her publishers, editors, and agent. He participated in the poet's literary enterprises and in her wide circle of literary and family friends. The study reveals intimate acquaintance with the Harlem Renaissance, with the Chicago literary scene and its leading figures from the thirties on, with historical developments in black culture and consciousness, and with the significant figures and activities that impressed the poet's life and art. It places Brooks' work in the context of the civil rights movement, the black arts movement, and black nationalism. Gwendolyn Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1950 for Annie Allen and is today widely recognized as one of the nation's leading poets, yet her work has received less than its due from mainstream critics. Kent's authoritative book has been one step in correcting that neglect.

Barry Bingham, Sr., was one of this country's most influential journalists. Under his half-century of leadership, the Louisville Courier-Journal became one of America's leading newspapers, as attested by six Pulitzer Prizes. In this illuminating oral history, Samuel Thomas weaves together excerpts from more than a dozen interviews with Bingham, along with selections from his writings and comments by his wife, Mary Caperton Bingham.Barry Bingham's influence was voiced principally through newspaper journalism, but, besides owning the Courier-Journal and its evening companion, the Louisville Times, the family enterprises included WHAS radio and television and Standard Gravure Corporation, which also produced Sunday supplements for dozens of newspapers. Bingham's enterprises laid on the doorsteps of Kentuckians, and brought to them over the airwaves, insightful reporting and examination of state and local matters as well as in-depth coverage of national and world events.Bingham espoused many causes, including mental health, military preparedness, press freedom, and liberal politics. He championed civil rights, the performing arts, better education, historic preservation, and land conservation.By training and predilection, Bingham was first and foremost a writer, but he was equally articulate as a conversationalist and public speaker. His recorded interviews, excerpted here, are clear and concise, expressive and informative. From these selections emerges a portrait of a man of extraordinary vision who used his wealth and power for the good of his community, his state, and his nation.

" Headless visions -- howls and moans -- ghostly ladies dressed in black and white -- a fiddling spirit dancing on the road. Such are the sights and sounds that inhabit the pages of Lynwood Montell's Kentucky Ghosts. This collection is representative of the rich tradition of ghost or "haint" tales passed on through the ages and across cultures as a way of dealing with death and the lore of the spirit world. In retelling the tales, Montell has included details about architecture, geography, and local culture. Each tale is told in the voice of the narrator who believe the story to be true. And, who knows... ?

" William Walker's Southern Harmony, first published in 1835, was the most popular tune book of the nineteenth century, containing 335 sacred songs, dominated by the folk hymns of oral tradition and written in the old four-shape notation that was for generations the foundation of musical teaching in rural America. Born in 1809 in South Carolina, William Walker grew up near Spartanburg and early became devoted to the Welsh Baptist Church of his ancestors and to the musical heritage that church had brought to early America. Walker became a singing master, and Southern Harmony was compiled for his students in hundreds of singing schools all over North and South Carolina and Georgia and in eastern Tennessee. Southern Harmony reached Kentucky in the company of music-loving pioneers, and today an annual singing in Benton, Kentucky, remains the only such occasion on which Southern Harmony is consistently the source of the music. The CD included with the book contains 29 tunes, hymns, psalms, odes, and anthems, including ""New Britain"" (Amazing Grace), ""Happy Land,"" ""O Come, Come Away,"" ""Wondrous Love,"" and many, many more.

Kentucky's contribution to the perennially popular American craft of quiltmaking is a rich and varied one. Mary Clarke examines here the state of the craft in Kentucky and finds it as lively today as it was 150 years ago.Like a fingerprint, every Kentucky quilt differs from all others in some respects, whether it is an original creation or a variation of one of the traditional patterns long popular in the United States. And many Kentucky quilts reveal much about the individual maker -- her disposition, taste, and lifestyle, the familiar objects that bring joy to her daily life, and her response to events beyond the confines of family and home.Taken as a whole, Kentucky quilts and quilt names reflect the history of the Commonwealth, at every turn showing the intermingling of old and new in the grassroots continuity of an ancient craft that responds to fads and fashions by absorbing and refining them.

Congress does most of its work in committee, and no understanding of that body can be complete without an analysis of its committees and those who shape them. Andrée Reeves now offers a rare glimpse into the workings of committee chairmanship over a span of thirty-three years-how three chairmen operated and how they influenced their committee and its impact.As Reeves demonstrates, the chair is the most important player in a congressional committee-the one who holds more cards than his colleagues and can deal a winning hand or call a bluff. His use of institutional and personal resources affects the committee, the chamber, and public policy.As a case study, Reeves compares the leadership of three disparate and strong House Education and Labor Committee chairmen who served from 1950 to 1984: Graham A. Barden (D-NC), Adam Clayton Powell (D-NY), and Carl D. Perkins (D-KY). She delves into each chairman's background, orientation, and use of resources. Each had his own brand of leadership, she finds, and a pronounced but different impact on Education and Labor. The committee blocked "progressive" legislation under Barden, facilitated Johnson's Great Society under Powell, and fought tooth and nail to maintain its accomplishments under Perkins.Reeves emphasizes also committee development, including the effects of reforms, the relationship between committee composition and policy output, and committee voting patterns. Rather than advancing smoothly and incrementally, Education and Labor developed in stages that coincided with each chairmanship. And over the years covered, it evolved into a more complex, decentralized, and democratic organization.This is an illuminating study of three men who made a difference in our nation's governance. They left a legacy for succeeding chairmen and indeed for the House, and their chairmanships have had a lasting impact on our society.

The British House of Commons has entered a period of substantial change, moving from a state of party cohesion and party leadership toward a more individualistic and active policy-making role. In the dynamic look at the British Parliament and its members, Philip Norton and David M. Wood highlight that change to more intensive constituency response and service on the part of individual members. Like members of the U.S. Congress, British Members of Parliament (MPs) are elected to represent geographical districts. The relationship between the MP and the constituency in Britain has become more important in recent years, but the major changes that have occurred in the relationship since the late 1960s have not been matched by extensive scholarly study. Some pathbreaking work has been done on the subject, but it remains overshadowed by the wealth of material focusing on MPs' activities within the legislative chambers at Westminster. This volume seeks to fill the gap by sketching and assessing the electoral significance of the MPs' constituency work and the broader political ramifications for the workings of the British Parliament. Its findings allow the MP to be seen in full.Norton and Wood argue that the constituency role has gained in importance in recent decades as MPs have become more career-oriented than their forerunners in mid-century. But a by-product of greater professionalism and careerism has been an expanded job description that may take MPs' time and energies away from playing a more effective role in helping to shape the broader policy alternatives for the United Kingdom.

When Richard G. Hatcher became the first black mayor of Gary, Indiana in 1967, the response of Gary's white businessmen was to move the entire downtown to the suburbs, thereby weakening the city core. Meanwhile, white business and institutional leaders in Atlanta, Detroit, and Newark worked with black mayors heading those majority-black cities to rebuild their downtowns and neigh¬borhoods. Why not Gary?Robert A. Catlin, who served as Mayor Hatcher's planning advisor from 1982 to 1987, here analyzes the racial conflicts that tore Gary apart. He asserts that two types of majority-black cities exist. Type I -- including Atlanta, Baltimore, Detroit, and Newark -- have Fortune 500 corporate headquarters, major universities, and large medical centers -- institutions that are placebound -- and their leaders must work with black mayors. Type II cities like Gary lack these resources; thus, their white leaders feel less compelled to cooperate with black mayors. Unfortunately in Gary's case, black politicians and white executives fell victim to pettiness and mistrust, and, as a result, Gary and the entire northwest Indiana region suffered.Racial Politics and Urban Planning is required reading for citizens interested in urban affairs. Leaders in cities such as Albany and Macon, Georgia; Monroe, Louisiana; Mount Vernon, New York; and Pine Bluff, Arkansas, should also take note. Those cities have just become majority black and are in the Type II category. Will they learn from Gary, or are they doomed to repeat its mistakes?

Social change has placed new demands on the practice of medicine, altering almost every aspect of patient care relationships. Just as medicine was encouraged to embrace the biological sciences some 100 years ago, recent directives indicate the importance of the social sciences in understanding biomedical practice. Humanistic challenges call for changes in curative and technological imperatives. In this book, social scientists contribute to such challenges by using social evidence to indicate appropriate new goals for health care in a changing environment.This book was designed to stimulate and challenge all those concerned with the human interactions that constitute medical practice. To encompass a wide range of topics, the authors include researchers; practicing physicians from the specialties of family, general, geriatric, pediatric, and oncological medicine; social and behavioral scientists; and public health representatives. Cutting across disciplinary boundaries, they explore the ethical, economic, and social aspects of patient care.These essays draw on past studies of the patient-doctor relationship and generate new and important questions. They address social behavior in patient care as a way to approach theoretical issues pertinent to the social and medical sciences. The authors also use social variables to study patient care and suggest new areas of sociomedical inquiry and new approaches to medical practice, education, and research.Its cross-disciplinary approach and jargon-free writing make this book an important and accessible tool for physician, scholar, and student.

Many black soldiers serving in the U.S. Army during World War II hoped that they might make permanent gains as a result of their military service and their willingness to defend their country. They were soon disabused of such illusions. Taps for a Jim Crow Army is a powerful collection of letters written by black soldiers in the 1940s to various government and nongovernment officials. The soldiers expressed their disillusionment, rage, and anguish over the discrimination and segregation they experienced in the Army. Most black troops were denied entry into army specialist schools; black officers were not allowed to command white officers; black soldiers were served poorer food and were forced to ride Jim Crow military buses into town and to sit in Jim Crow base movie theaters. In the South, German POWs could use the same latrines as white American soldiers, but blacks could not. The original foreword by Benjamin Quarles, professor emeritus of history at Morgan State University, and a new foreword by Bernard C. Nalty, the chief historian in the Office of Air Force History, offer rich insights into the world of these soldiers.

Otis Rice tells the dramatic story of how the first state beyond the mountains came into being. Kentucky dates its settled history from the founding of Harrodsburg in 1774 and of Boonesborough in 1775. But the drama of frontier Kentucky had its beginnings a full century before the arrival of James Harrod and Daniel Boone. The early history of the Bluegrass state is a colorful and significant chapter in the expansion of the American frontier.Rice traces the development of Kentucky through the end of the Revolutionary War. He deals with four major themes: the great imperial rivalry between England and France in the mid-eighteenth century for control of the Ohio Valley; the struggle of white settlers to possess lands claimed by the Indians and the liquidation of Indian rights through treaties and bloody conflicts; the importance of the land, the role of the speculator, and the progress of settlement; the conquest of a wilderness bountiful in its riches but exacting in its demands and the planting of political, social, and cultural institutions. Included are maps that show the changing boundaries of Kentucky as it moved toward statehood.