Thomas Merton: Social Critic organizes and critically analyzes the social thought of the Cistercian monk who has become an internationally known symbol of the spiritual element in man. The author evaluated all of Merton's writings, published and unpublished, then discussed his interpretations with Merton personally. The result is a perceptive relation of Merton's social thought to its genesis in his own life experiences and contemplation, a faithful rendering of Merton's thought on the problems of our time. Merton, the author makes clear, called for a spiritual, social, and religious union. It was a poetic and sometimes unimplemented solution to alienation and division, a valid and authentic, if at times limited, response to the contemporary chaos. This study will be greeted by a strong reaction from Mertonians everywhere.

For centuries before Europeans came to the New World, tobacco had an important role in the religious and social life of the early peoples of Kentucky. W.F. Axton describes the various forms in which tobacco has been used, its quick adoption by the Old World, and its gradual development into the forms common today, especially the blended cigarette. Little has been written about the place occupied by Burley leaf in the economic life of the Commonwealth, where tobacco is still the most important crop. Tobacco in Kentucky is accompanied by charts and maps illustrating the many aspects of tobacco production.

In his brief life John C. Breckinridge embraced the roles of lawyer, politician, statesman, soldier, exile, and businessman. An imposing and tactful man, he was exceptional for evoking both loyal devotion from his followers and generous respect from his opponents during a strife-torn era. Breckinridge's meteoric rise to national prominence began with election to the Kentucky legislature in 1849 and to the United States Congress in 1851. His eloquence earned him the Democratic Party's nomination for the vice presidency in 1856, and he became the youngest man ever to hold that office. Nearing the end of his term Breckinridge was elected United States senator by the Kentucky legislature. He was a favorite of the Southern faction during the 1860 Democratic convention. Had the nation and the party not foundered on the divisive issues of slavery, section, and union, Breckinridge might well have reached the White House.With the sundering of the Union, Breckinridge joined the Confederate states, was commissioned a brigadier general, and fought valiantly at Shiloh, Chickamauga, Cold Harbor, and elsewhere before becoming secretary of war. The collapse of the Confederacy drove him into exile in Canada and Europe. But in 1869 he returned to Kentucky to live out his life quietly and industriously as a lawyer and railroad executive.Proud Kentuckian portrays the most illustrious member of one of Kentucky's first families.

The turbulent career of William Goebel (1856--1900), which culminated in assassination, marked an end-of-the-century struggle for political control of Kentucky. Although populism had become a strong force in the nation, the Louisville and Nashville Railroad and ex-Confederates still dominated the state and its Democratic party. Touting reforms and attaching the railroad monopoly, Goebel challenged this old order. A Yankee in a state that fancied itself southern, Goebel had to depend on a strong organization to win votes. As "The Kenton King" he created a new style of politics. To some he was a progressive reformer; to others, a tyrannical machine boss. His drive for power and his enemies' fierce opposition aroused violent political factionalism. Goebel's fateful duel with a rival, his partisan election law, and his ruthless convention tactics led to the bitterly contested gubernatorial election of 1899 that resulted in his murder.Although the full truth about the murder was never revealed in nearly a decade of trials and the advent of progressive politics was long delayed in Kentucky, Goebel's death did relieve the state's political turmoil and induce some legal reforms. Using new sources and fresh perspectives, James C. Klotter portrays Goebel's tumultuous era and discovers the real man within the obscurity of his conflicting images.

In more than two hundred years of statehood, most Kentucky women have been invisible to history. Yet from the first settlement, women have been prominent contributors to Kentucky history and culture. Women in Kentucky tells the stories of the ordinary women of lonely frontier farms, the women both black and white whose lives were shaped by slavery, and the laboring women of the factories and shops in rising urban centers. Helen Deiss Irvin also profiles the exceptional Kentucky women whose lives became more visible: abolitionist Delia Webster, suffragists Laura Clay and Madeline McDowell Breckinridge, philanthropists Mary Breckinridge and Linda Neville, reformer Carry Nation, scholar and educator Sophonisba Breckinridge, and physician Louise Gilman Hutchins. Women in Kentucky casts a new light on the active and full participation of women in Kentucky's long and storied history.

On October 30, 1947, the House Committee on Un-American Activities concluded the first round of hearings on the allege Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry. Hollywood was ordered to "clean its own house," and ten witnesses who had refused to answer questions about their membership in the Screen Writers Guild and the Communist party eventually received contempt citations. By 1950 the Hollywood Ten, as they quickly became known, were serving prison sentences ranging from six months to a year. Since that time the group, which included writers, directors, and a producer, have been either dismissed as industry hacks or eulogized as Cold War martyrs, but never have they been discussed in terms of their profession.Radical Innocence is the first study to focus on the work of the Ten: their short stories, plays, novels, criticism, poems, memoirs, and, of course, their films. Drawing on myriad sources, including archival materials, unpublished manuscripts, black-market scripts, screenplay drafts, letters, and personal interviews, Bernard F. Dick describes the Ten's survival tactics during the blacklisting and analyzes the contribution of these ten individuals no only to film but also to the arts. Radical Innocence captures the personality of each of the Ten -- the arrogant Herbert J. Biberman, the witty Ring Lardner, Jr., the patriarchal Samuel Ornitz, the compassionate Adrian Scott, and the feisty Dalton Trumbo.

Although Kentucky was not subject to reconstruction as such, the period of readjustment following the Civil War was a troubled one for the Commonwealth. Violence begun by guerillas continued for years. In addition, white "Regulators" tried to cow the new freedmen and keep them in a perpetual state of fearful submission that would assure the agricultural labor supply. Their attacks produced exactly the effects whites least desired: the blacks became all the more determined to leave the countryside, and the federal government imposed the Freedmen's Bureau to protect the former slaves. Kentucky in the Reconstruction Era shows how this and other forms of federal intervention angered even the most loyal white citizens, leading to Kentucky's hostility to the national administration and consequent reputation as a state dominated by ex-Confederates.Gradually, however, things began to change, as hopes for future prosperity outweighed past disappointments. While the old feuds were not healed during this period, many of the state's leaders shifted their attention to more productive matters, and the way was opened to eventual reconciliation.

Play of a Fiddle gives voice to people who steadfastly hold to and build on the folk traditions of their ancestors. While encountering the influences of an increasingly overwhelming popular culture, the men and women in this book follow age-old patterns of folklife and custom, making their own music and dance in celebration of them. Shedding new light on a region that maintains ties to the cultural identities of its earliest European and African inhabitants, Gerald Milnes shows how folk music in West Virginia borrowed rhythmic, melodic, and vocal forms from the Celtic, Anglo, Germanic, and African traditions. These elements have come together to create a body of music tied more to place and circumstance than to ethnicity.Milnes explores the legacies of the state's best-known performers and musical families. He discusses religious music, balladeering, the influence of black musicians and styles, dancing, banjo and dulcimer traditions, and the importance of old-time music as a cultural pillar of West Virginia life. A musician himself, Milnes has been collecting songs and stories in West Virginia for more than twenty-five years. The result is an enjoyable book filled with anecdotes, local history, and keen observations about musical lives.

In this informed and entertaining essay, John H. Ellis describes the efforts of physicians and laymen to keep illness at bay during Kentucky's first 200 years. Medicine in Kentucky is part of the Kentucky Bicentennial Bookshelf, "a celebration of two centuries of the history and culture of The Commonwealth. "John H. Ellis outlines the practice and development of medicine in Kentucky from the state of medical practices during the colonial era and the paucity of trained practitioners, to the frontier doctors of the early days of Westward expansion, to the founding of the first medical school chartered in the West, Transylvania University.Ellis also details some of the commonly encountered diseases, the various types of practitioners (allopaths, herb doctors, Thomsonians, and homeopaths), and the various, generally short-lived publications and medical societies of nineteenth century Kentucky. He highlights two native Kentuckians, Joseph Nathaniel McCormack, principal architect of the current structure of the AMA, and Abraham Flexner, whose "Medical Education in the United States and Canada" is one of the great landmarks in the field, whether one feels that he laid the foundation for modern scientific medical education or merely set in concrete nineteenth century scientism as the basis for medical education.Although dealing principally with Kentucky medicine, it reflects also on the happenings in medicine across the country.

As an outpost of the advancing frontier, Kentucky played a crucial military role. Kentucky's state militia, which, under federal law, enrolled every able-bodied male citizen aged eighteen to forty-five, helped to secure the West for white settlers during the bloody Indian wars. Its members suffered defeat, capture, and death in the War of 1812, but also contributed to victories in the battles of the Thames and New Orleans. Though some Kentucky volunteers campaigned in the Mexican-American War, the general militia was moribund by the middle of the nineteenth century. Its infrequent musters had degenerated into sometimes mirthful and sometimes tragic frolics.A Brittle Sword provides a lively interpretation of Kentucky's citizen-soldiers and their role in the military history of both the state and the nation.

Becoming Bourgeois is the first study to focus on what historians have come to call the "middling sort," the economic group falling between yeoman farmers and the planter class that dominated the antebellum South. At a time when Southerners rarely traveled far from their homes, these merchants annually ventured forth on buying junkets to northern cities. The southern merchant community promoted the kind of aggressive business practices that proponents of the "New South" would later claim as their own. Frank J. Byrne reveals the peculiar strains of modern liberal-capitalist and conservative thought that permeated the culture of southern merchants. By exploring the values men and women in merchant families espoused, Byrne not only offers new insight into southern history but also deepens our understanding of the mutable ties between regional identity and the marketplace in nineteenth-century America.

Kentucky history centers on the Bluegrass; this is not to say that the rest of Kentucky does not have a rich story, but chronologically, the beginning was here. Too, Bluegrass history can scarcely be separated from the rest of the state. Boonesboro and Harrodsburg, Henry Clay and Elizabeth Madox Roberts are the cherished possessions of all Kentuckians. Jane Todd Crawford and Dr. Ephraim McDowell stood in for humanity. It is a great matter of local pride that they did so in Kentucky.Bluegrass Cavalcade brings together fifty-five Kentucky writers to write about their home state and to capture a taste of the rich regional flavor of the Bluegrass as an introduction to Kentucky history. Among the selections included in this volume is represented a small army of distinguished authors who have viewed Kentucky from various perspectives. Edited by revered state historian Thomas D. Clark, Bluegrass Cavalcade is meant to be a literary and historical reception where these esteemed Kentucky writers meet their readers.Featuring Contributions from:John FilsonBasil DukeCassius Marcellus ClayJohn Fox, Jr.Robert Penn WarrenHarriet Beecher StoweElizabeth Madox RobertsJames Lane AllenandHenry Watterson

These eleven original essays by well-known eighteenth-century scholars, five of them editors of James Boswell's journal or letters, commemorate the bicentenary of Boswell's death on May 19, 1795. The volume illuminates both the life and the work of one of the most important literary figures of the age and contributes significantly to the scholarship on this rich period.In the introduction, Irma S. Lustig sets the tone for the volume. She reveals that the essays examining Boswell as "Citizen of the World" are deliberately paired with those that analyze his artistic skills, to emphasize that "Boswell's sophistication as a writer is inseparable from his cosmopolitanism." The essays in Part I focus on the relationship of the Enlightenment, at home and abroad, to Boswell's personal development. Marlies K. Danziger restores to significant life the continental philosophers and theologians Boswell consulted in his search for religious certainty. Peter Perreten examines Boswell's enraptured study of Italian antiquity and his responses to the European landscape. Richard B. Sher and Perreten document the personal and aesthetic influence of Henry Home, Lord Kames, Scottish jurist and leading Enlightenment figure, on Boswell. Michael Fry discusses Boswell's relationship with Henry Dundas, political manager for Scotland, and Thomas Crawford examines Boswell's long-standing interest in the volatile political issues of the period, including the French Revolution, through his correspondence with William Johnson Temple. In evaluation Boswell's performance as Laird of Auchinleck, John Strawhorn documents his efforts to improve the estate by use of new agricultural methods.The essays in Part II study aspects of Boswell's artistry in Life of Johnson, the magnum opus that set a standard for biography. Carey McIntosh examines Boswell's use of rhetoric, and William P. Yarrow offers a close scrutiny of metaphor. Isobel Grundy invokes Virginia Woolf in demonstrating Boswell's acceptance of uncertainty as a biographer. John B. Radner reveals Boswell's self-assertive strategies in his visit with Johnson at Ashbourne in September 1777, and, finally, Lustig examines as a "subplot" of the biography Johnson's patient efforts to win the friendship of Margaret Montgomerie Boswell. An appendix by Hitoshi Suwabe serves scholars by providing the most exact account to date of Boswell's meetings with Johnson.

In 1893, the year that marked the four hundredth anniversary of the landing of Columbus in the New World, Chicago was host to an exposition to mark the occasion. Although the World's Columbian Exposition was the fifteenth world's fair, it was of vastly greater scope than any of its predecessors. Chicago created a veritable new city. It was not only larger than any previous exposition but also more elaborately designed, more precisely laid out, more fully realized, and more prophetic. It was the first exposition truly to solicit the participation of the entire world.In this study of the White City, David F. Burg shows America at a crossroads in its development. It was in the process of moving from a largely agricultural society to a predominately urban and industrial one. The exposition was an index of American values, achievements, and expectation in this era of profound and complex change. The exposition was an achievement of cooperative endeavor and expertise. It demonstrated that both artistic capacity and technology were available to transform, in agreeable combination, burgeoning industrial cities into well-designed centers of business, culture, and community.Burg places his discussion in the context of the United States and Chicago during the early 1890s. Besides dealing with the multifaceted fair itself -- its architecture, artworks, music, technological achievements -- he discusses the congresses that were held on a variety of subjects, two of the most significant being the Congresses of Women and the World's Parliament of Religions.In the exposition's theme was the potential of fashioning the Kingdom of God on earth in contrast to the chaotic, dirty, industrial cities of the time. Burg finds in the exposition a significant legacy to architecture, city planning, and civic organization. Its most promising aftereffect occurred in the City Beautiful movement; its influence extended also to such ordinary concerns as well-lighted streets, efficient waste disposal, and honest government.

No general history of southern farming since the end of slavery has been published until now. For the first time, Gilbert C. Fite has drawn together the many threads that make up commercial agricultural development in the eleven states of the old Confederacy, to explain why agricultural change was so slow in the South, and then to show how the agents of change worked after 1933 to destroy the old and produce a new agriculture. Fite traces the decline and departure of King Cotton as the hard taskmaster of the region, and the replacement of cotton by a somewhat more democratically rewarding group of farm products: poultry, cattle, swine; soybeans; citrus and other fruits; vegetables; rice; dairy products; and forest products. He shows how such crop changes were related to other developments, such as the rise of a capital base in the South, mainly after World War II; technological innovation in farming equipment; and urbanization and regional population shifts.Based largely upon primary sources, Cotton Fields No More will become the standard work on post-Civil War agriculture in the South. It will be welcomed by students of the American South and of United States agriculture, economic, and social history.

The mythological, folkloric, and religious beliefs of Western culture have resulted in a long and ongoing history of esoteric themes in theatre from the Middle Ages to the present in Spain and the America. Now Robert Lima, a noted comparatist, brings to bear on this material his wide knowledge of the world of the occult. Lima defines the terms "occult" and "occultism" broadly to embrace the many ways in which humans have sought to fathom a secret knowledge held to be accessible only through such supernatural agencies as alchemy, angelology, asceticism, astrology, demonolatry, divination, ecstasy, magic, necromancy, possession, Santeria, séances, voudoun, and witchcraft. The dramatic works covered range from medieval materializations of Hell to the Golden Age plays of Lope de vega, Tirso de Molina, and Calderón de la Barca, to modern stage works by Valle-Inclán, García Lorca, Casona, Miras, and a number of significant Afro-Brazilian and Caribbean dramatists. The concluding comprehensive bibliography of the drama of the occult is invaluable.