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The notorious conflict between the Hatfield and the McCoy families
of West Virginia and Kentucky is often remembered as America's most
famous feud, but it was relatively brief and subdued compared to
the violence in Breathitt County, Kentucky. From the Reconstruction
period until the early twentieth century, Breathitt's 500 square
miles of rugged upcountry land was known as "the darkest and
bloodiest of all the dark and bloody feud counties" due to its
considerable number of homicides, which were not always related to
the factional conflicts that swept the region. In Bloody Breathitt,
T. R. C. Hutton casts a critical eye on this territory for the
first time. He carefully investigates instances of individual and
mass violence in the county from the Civil War through the
Progressive era, exploring links between specific incidents and
broader national and regional events. Although the killings were
typically portrayed as depoliticized occurrences, Hutton explains
how their causes and implications often reflected distinctly
political intentions. By framing the incidents as "feuds," those in
positions of authority disguised politically motivated murders by
placing them in a fictive past, preventing outsiders from
understanding the complex reality. This meticulously researched
volume offers the first comprehensive narrative of the violence in
this infamous Kentucky county, examining Breathitt's brutal history
and its significance to the state, the South, and the nation. While
the United States has enjoyed unparalleled longevity as a republic,
Hutton's timely study reminds readers that the nation's political
stability has had a tremendous cost in terms of bloodshed.
Bearing the Torch stands as a comprehensive history of the
University of Tennessee, replete with anecdotes and vignettes of
interest to anyone interested in UT, from the administrators and
chancellors to students and alums, and even to the Vols fans whose
familiarity with the school comes mainly from the sports page. It
is also a biography of a school whose history reflects that of its
state and its nation. The institution that began as Blount College
in 1794 in a frontier village called Knoxville exemplifies the
relationship between education and American history. This is the
first scholarly history of UT since 1984. T. R. C. Hutton not only
provides a much-needed update, but also seeks to present a social
history of the university, fully integrating historical context and
showing how the volume's central "character"-the university
itself-reflects historical themes and concerns. For example, Hutton
shows how the school's development was hampered in the early
nineteenth century by stingy state funding (a theme that also
appears in subsequent decades) and Jacksonian fears that publicly
funded higher education equaled elite privilege. The institution
nearly disappeared as the Civil War raged in a divided region, but
then it flourished thanks to policies that never could have
happened without the war. In the twentieth century, students
embraced dramatic social changes as the university wrestled with
race, gender, and other important issues. In the Cold War era, UT
became a successful research institution and entered into a deep
partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratories that persists to
this day. All the while UT athletics experienced the highs of
national championships and the lows of lawsuits and losing seasons.
UT is a university with a universe of historical experiences. The
University of Tennessee's story has always been defined by
inclusion and exclusion, and the school has triumphed when it
practiced the former and failed when it took part in the latter.
Bearing the Torch traces that ongoing process, richly detailing the
University's contributions to what one president, Joseph Estabrook,
called the "diffusion of knowledge among the people."
The history of capitalist development in the United States is long,
uneven, and overwhelmingly focused on the North. Macroeconomic
studies of the South have primarily emphasized the role of the
cotton economy in global trading networks. Until now, few in-depth
scholarly works have attempted to explain how capitalism in the
South took root and functioned in all of its diverse-and
duplicitous-forms. Southern Scoundrels explores the lesser-known
aspects of the emergence of capitalism in the region: the shady and
unscrupulous peddlers, preachers, slave traders, war profiteers,
thieves, and marginal men who seized available opportunities to get
ahead and, in doing so, left their mark on the southern economy.
Eschewing conventional economic theory, this volume features
narrative storytelling as engaging and seductive as the cast of
shifty characters under examination. Contributors cover the
chronological sweep of the nineteenth-century South, from the
antebellum era through the tumultuous and chaotic Civil War years,
and into Reconstruction and beyond. The geographic scope is equally
broad, with essays encompassing the Chesapeake, South Carolina, the
Lower Mississippi Valley, Texas, Missouri, and Appalachia. These
essays offer a series of social histories on the nineteenth-century
southern economy and the changes wrought by capitalist
transformation. Tracing that story through the kinds of oily
individuals who made it happen, Southern Scoundrels provides
fascinating insights into the region's hucksters and its history.
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