From the 1780s, when Louisville and Lexington were tiny clusters of houses in the wilderness, to the 1980s, when more than half of all Kentuckians live in urban areas, the growth of cities has affected nearly all aspects of life in the Commonwealth. These urban centers have led the state in economic, social, and cultural change.Cities in the Commonwealth examines the crises that have shaped the history of Kentucky's cities and sheds light on such continuing concerns as urban competition, provision of essential services, the importance of the arts, and the struggle for racial justice. By allowing contemporaries to tell much of the story in their own words, Allen J. Share conveys a sense of the exuberance and dynamism of urban life and thought in Kentucky.

"To be continued..

An intricate network of contacts developed among women in Europe and North America over the course of the nineteenth century. These women created virtual communities through communication, support, and a shared ideology. Forged across boundaries of nationality, language, ethnic origin, and even class, these connections laid the foundation for the 1888 International Council of Women and formed the beginnings of an international women's movement. This matrix extended throughout England and the Continent and included Scandinavia and Finland.In a remarkable display of investigative research, Margaret McFadden describes the burgeoning avenues of communication in the nineteenth century that led to an explosion in the number of international contacts among women. This network blossomed because of increased travel opportunities; advances in women's literacy and education; increased activity in the temperance, abolitionist, and peace reform movements; and the emergence of female evangelicals, political revolutionaries, and expatriates. Particular attention is paid to five women whose decades of work helped give birth to the women's movement by century's end. These ""mothers of the matrix"" include Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton of the United States, Anna Doyle Wheeler of Ireland, Fredrika Bremer of Sweden, and Frances Power Cobbe of England. Despite their philosophic differences, these leaders recognized the value of friendship and advocacy among women and shared an affinity for bringing together people from different cultural settings.McFadden demonstrates without question that the traditions of transatlantic female communication are far older than most historians realize and that the women's movement was inherently international. No other scholar has painted so complete a picture of the golden cables that linked the women who saw the Atlantic and the borders within Europe as bridges rather than barriers to improving their status.

First published in English in 1918 by the American Museum of Natural History in its series of Anthropological Papers, the stories told here in Tales of Yukaghir were collected among Russianized natives of Eastern Siberia at the end of the nineteenth-century while Bogaras was exiled into North-Eastern Siberia for revolutionary activities. These tales tell of kings, young heroes on horseback, and adventurous animals with varied powers, relating details of native life that clearly show their Russian or Turko-Mongol provenance. In addition to delighting audiences around the world, Bogoras's work in ethnography and ethnology proved valuable to the development of the field of linguistics.

Wilfred Grenfell was sent to Newfoundland in 1892 to improve the plight of coastal inhabitants and fishermen. The initial Grenfell text, Vikings of To-day, is intended to summarize three years among the residents of Labrador. These three years would lead to a lifetime spent in aid and passionate defense of the Labradorians. Beginning with descriptions of the environment, Grenfell sees the hardships and ingeniousness with which these people live off the land and maintain an indomitable spirit.

One of the most renowned Washington insiders of the twentieth century, Clark Clifford (1906--1998) was a top advisor to four Democratic presidents. As a powerful corporate attorney, he advised Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Jimmy Carter. As special counsel to Truman, Clifford helped to articulate the Truman Doctrine, grant recognition to Israel, create the Marshall Plan, and build the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). After winning the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination, Kennedy asked Clifford to analyze the problems he would face in taking over the executive branch and later appointed him chairman of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Johnson named Clifford secretary of defense in 1968, but their warm relationship was strained when Clifford concluded that there was no plan for victory in the Vietnam War and that the United States was in a "bottomless pit." Even Carter, who kept his distance from Washington insiders, turned to Clifford for help. In Clark Clifford: The Wise Man of Washington, John Acacia chronicles Clifford's rise from midwestern lawyer to Washington power broker and presidential confidant. He covers the breadth and span of Clifford's involvement in numerous pivotal moments of American history, providing a window to the inner workings of the executive office. Drawing from a wealth of sources, the author reveals Clifford's role as one of the most trusted advisors in American history and as a primary architect of cold war foreign policy.

One of the lesser known stories of the Civil War is the role played by escaped slaves in the Union blockade along the Atlantic coast. From the beginning of the war, many African American refugees sought avenues of escape to the North. Due to their sheer numbers, those who reached Union forces presented a problem for the military. The problem was partially resolved by the First Confiscation Act of 1861, which permitted the seizure of property used in support of the South's war effort, including slaves. Eventually regarded as contraband of war, the runaways became known as contrabands. In Bluejackets and Contrabands, Barbara Brooks Tomblin examines the relationship between the Union Navy and the contrabands. The navy established colonies for the former slaves and, in return, some contrabands served as crewmen on navy ships and gunboats and as river pilots, spies, and guides. Tomblin presents a rare picture of the contrabands and casts light on the vital contributions of African Americans to the Union Navy and the Union cause.

In Ghosts of the Bluegrass, James McCormick and Macy Wyatt present stories of Kentucky ghosts past and present. Some of the tales are set in rural areas, but many take place in urban areas such as the haunted house on Broadway in downtown Lexington and in buildings on the University of Kentucky campus, where Adolph Rupp is said to have conversed with the deceased biology professor Dr. Funkhouser. This volume contains chapters on haunted places, poltergeists, communication with the dead, and ghosts who linger to resolve unfinished business from their past lives, as well as a chapter about ghosts who reveal themselves through lights, changes in temperature, or sound. The book even features a chilling account by a nineteenth-century family haunted in their Breckinridge County home. Whether witnesses believe that a spirit has come to protect those it left behind or to complete an unfinished task, ghostly appearances remain a mystery. As McCormick and Wyatt point out, there are no right or wrong answers when it comes to the supernatural. One thing is certain: these tales will bring pleasure and perhaps a goose bump or two to the reader interested in ghost stories and folklore in the Kentucky tradition.

A former Sunday school teacher and Hollywood actor, Ronald Reagan was an unlikely candidate for president. His charisma, conviction, and leadership earned him the governorship of California, from which he launched his successful bid to become the fortieth president of the United States in 1980. Reagan's political legacy continues to be the standard by which all conservatives are judged. In The Enduring Reagan, editor Charles W. Dunn brings together eight prominent scholars to examine the political career and legacy of Ronald Reagan. This anthology offers a bold reassessment of the Reagan years and the impact they had on the United States and the world.

While vampire stories have been part of popular culture since the beginning of the nineteenth century, it has been in recent decades that they have become a central part of American culture. Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture looks at how vampire stories -- from Bram Stoker's Dracula to Blacula, from Bela Lugosi's films to Love at First Bite -- have become part of our ongoing debate about what it means to be human.William Patrick Day looks at how writers and filmmakers as diverse as Anne Rice and Andy Warhol present the vampire as an archetype of human identity, as well as how many post-modern vampire stories reflect our fear and attraction to stories of addiction and violence. He argues that contemporary stories use the character of Dracula to explore modern values, and that stories of vampire slayers, such as the popular television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, integrate current feminist ideas and the image of the Vietnam veteran into a new heroic version of the vampire story.

In early April of 1888, sixteen-year-old Mary Ann Donovan stood alone on the quays of Queenstown in county Cork waiting to board a ship for Boston in far-off America. She was but one of almost 700,000 young, usually unmarried women, traveling alone, who left their homes in Ireland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in a move unprecedented in the annals of European emigration.Using a wide variety of sources -- many of which appear here for the first time -- including personal reminiscences, interviews, oral histories, letter, and autobiographies as well as data from Irish and American census and emigration repots, Janet Nolan makes a sustained analysis of this migration of a generation of young women that puts a new light on Irish social and economic history. By the late nineteenth century changes in Irish life combined to make many young women unneeded in their households and communities; rather than accept a marginal existence, they elected to seek a better life in a new world, often with the encouragement and help of a female relative who had already emigrated. Mary Ann Donovan's journey was representative of thousands of journeys made by Irish women who could truly claim that they had seized control over their lives, by themselves, alone. This book tells their story.

Agriculture is the most fundamental of all human activities. Today, those who till the soil or tend livestock feed a world population of approximately 6.5 billion. Fifty years ago, the planet could not have sustained such a large population, and according to present projections, farmers will have to feed nine billion people by 2050. The greatest agricultural revolution in history has occurred in the last fifty years, with farmers in the United States leading the way. America's declining number of farms, however, comes as a surprise to many and may have dramatic implications. Paul K. Conkin's A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American Agriculture since 1929 charts the profound changes in farming that have occurred during his lifetime. Conkin's personal experience growing up on a small Tennessee farm complements compelling statistical data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Using economic and historical analysis, Conkin assesses the skills, new technologies, and government policies that helped transform American farming. He clarifies the present status of a subsidized, large-scale, mechanized, and chemically supported agriculture, evaluates its environmental and human costs, and surveys alternatives to a troubled, widely challenged system.

Pathbreaking and controversial, Darwin and International Relations offers the first comprehensive analysis of international affairs of state through the lens of evolutionary theory. Bradley A. Thayer provides a new method for investigating and explaining human and state behavior while generating insights into the origins of human and animal warfare, ethnic conflict, and the influence of disease on international relations. Using ethnological and statistical studies of warfare among tribal societies, Thayer argues that humans wage war for reasons predicted by evolutionary theory -- to gain and protect vital resources but also for the physically and emotionally stimulating effects of combat. Thayer demonstrates that an evolutionary understanding of disease will become a more important part of the study of international relations as new strains of diseases emerge and advances in genetics make biological warfare a more effective weapon for states and terrorists. He also explains the deep causes of ethnic conflict by illuminating how xenophobia and ethnocentrism evolved in humans. He notes that these behaviors once contributed to our ancestors' success in radically different environments, but they remain a part of us. Darwin and International Relations makes a major contribution to our understanding of human history and the future of international relations.

Corruption has blurred, and in some cases blinded, the vision of democracy in many Latin American nations. Weakened institutions and policies have facilitated the rise of corrupt leadership, election fraud, bribery, and clientelism. Corruption and Democracy in Latin America presents a groundbreaking national and regional study that provides policy analysis and prescription through a wide-ranging methodological, empirical, and theoretical survey. The contributors offer analysis of key topics, including: factors that differentiate Latin American corruption from that of other regions; the relationship of public policy to corruption in regional perspective; patterns and types of corruption; public opinion and its impact; and corruption's critical links to democracy and governance.Additional chapters present case studies on specific instances of corruption: diverted funds from a social program in Peru; Chilean citizens' attitudes toward corruption; the effects of interparty competition on vote buying in local Brazilian elections; and the determinants of state-level corruption in Mexico under Vicente Fox.The volume concludes with a comparison of the lessons drawn from these essays to the evolution of anticorruption policy in Latin America over the past two decades. It also applies these lessons to the broader study of corruption globally to provide a framework for future research in this crucial area.

Many people wonder if an item stored in the attic or found at a tag sale could be a lost treasure. Joe Nickell's latest book, Real or Fake, offers a general introduction to the principles of authentication. Illustrating methods used by the pros and recognized by hit shows such as Antiques Roadshow, Nickell educates readers with the specific information necessary to begin forgery detection. Real or Fake focuses on three categories of potential treasures: documents, photographs, and other artifacts. Nickell critiques famous examples from each group to explain how his suggested techniques can be used to unmask fakes. The objects examined and tested for authenticity in the book include Jack the Ripper's diary, a draft of the Gettysburg Address, notes by Charles Dickens, a film of an alien autopsy, and debris from the Titanic. Nickell's extensive knowledge of the field is accessible to everyone -- from the general reader to the aspiring scientist -- who wants a better understanding of how the experts determine if a suspicious heirloom is real or fake.

Samuel R. Delany's The Jewel-Hinged Jaw appeared originally in 1977, and is now long out of print and hard to find. The impact of its demonstration that science fiction was a special language, rather than just gadgets and green-skinned aliens, began reverberations still felt in science fiction criticism. This edition includes two new essays, one written at the time and one written about those times, as well as an introduction by writer and teacher Matthew Cheney, placing Delany's work in historical context. Close textual analyses of Thomas M. Disch, Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, and Joanna Russ read as brilliantly today as when they first appeared. Essays such as "About 5,750 Words" and "To Read The Dispossessed" first made the book a classic; they assure it will remain one.