Presents the history of the exploration, settlement, and development of the vast mountain empire encompassed by several eastern Kentucky counties that pays attention to Civil War sites in the area.

Illustrated version of the traditional song about loving everything and everyone.

A young man loses his job and is forced to relocate. No one is hiring in such bleak economic times. America finds itself threatened by a world superpower firmly in control of global trade. Money is scarce, businesses fail, and the Bank of the United States closes its doors. The country will soon be embroiled in another war. This is not present day--the year is 1811.Craig Ridgeway, a 21-year old gunsmith from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, rides a flatboat down the Ohio River and settles in Breckinridge County, Kentucky to try his hand at farming. Through an accidental association with a notorious widow (the past proprietor of a liquor vault and prostitution den), he inherits a patch of rich bottomland, embraces a nearby family, and falls in love with the abandoned wife of a violent outlaw. Overcoming inexperience and hardships. Craig builds a promising new life, learning how to raise corn, tobacco and hemp. Inspired by the "Widder's" recipe, he and his wife Mary manufacture bourbon whiskey which he markets profitably in New Orleans. Nature bedazzles in a spectacular show of events--a total solar eclipse, blazing comet, violent earthquakes, and sky-blackening passenger pigeon flights. A new steamboat embarks on its first journey down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, ushering in a new economic era.However, good fortune comes at a high price. The looming war with Great Britain disrupts the economy and overshadows Craig's life. He must make choices that affect others in time of conflict. After twice refusing to fight on the northern frontier, he has one last chance to join his fellow Kentuckians in the heroic defense of New Orleans. The epic battle on the sugarcane plantations below the city provides redemption for the young American nation and for Craig who prays to survive, to return home to continue his adventure in life with Mary.Widder's Landing is a story of life, love, and survival set against the rugged Kentucky frontier.

A near-obsessive pursuit of ghost stories and odd superstitions cranks up this serious study of Appalachian tales of the supernatural and their origin in both old-world customs and real historical events. An effort to preserve and record one aspect of a dying way of life, the book relies on interviews and historic documents to search for the facts behind local lore of murder, witchcraft, and weird hauntings. Several campfire-worthy ghost stories are recounted in their entirety—including "The Swinging Gate of Fern Lake Hollow"—and an unexpectedly large number of stories about aliens and UFOs provide an interesting comparison of three-century-old mysteries and those stirred up in comparatively recent times

Prior to his death in 1985, Cratis Williams was a leading scholar of and spokesperson for Appalachian life and literature and a pioneer of the Appalachian studies movement. Williams was born in a log cabin on Caines Creek, Lawrence County, Kentucky, in 1911. To use his own terms, he was "a complete mountaineer." This book is an edited compilation of Williams' memoirs of his childhood. These autobiographical reminiscences often take the form of a folktale, with individual titles such as "Preacher Lang Gets Drunk" and "The Double Murder at Sledges." Schooled initially in traditional stories and ballads, he learned to read by the light of his grandfather's whiskey still and excelled at the local one-room school. After becoming the first person from Caines Creek to attend and graduate from the county high school in Louisa, he taught in one-room schools while pursuing his own education. He earned both a BA and MA from the University of Kentucky before moving to Appalachian State Teacher's College in 1942; later he earned a Ph.D. from New York University and then returned to Appalachian State.

The Disciples of Christ, one of the first Christian faiths to have originated in America, was established in 1832 in Lexington, Kentucky, by the union of two groups led by Alexander Campbell and Barton W. Stone. The modern churches resulting from the union are known collectively to religious scholars as part of the Stone-Campbell movement. If Stone and Campbell are considered the architects of the Disciples of Christ and America's first nondenominational movement, then Kentucky's Raccoon John Smith is their builder and mason. Raccoon John Smith: Frontier Kentucky's Most Famous Preacher is the biography of a man whose work among the early settlers of Kentucky carries an important legacy that continues in our own time. The son of a Revolutionary War soldier, Smith spent his childhood and adolescence in the untamed frontier country of Tennessee and southern Kentucky. A quick-witted, thoughtful, and humorous youth, Smith was shaped by the unlikely combination of his dangerous, feral surroundings and his Calvinist religious indoctrination. The dangers of frontier life made an even greater impression on John Smith as a young man, when several instances of personal tragedy forced him to question the philosophy of predeterminism that pervaded his religious upbringing. From these crises of faith, Smith emerged a changed man with a new vocation: to spread a Christian faith wherein salvation was available to all people. Thus began the long, ecclesiastical career of Raccoon John Smith and the germination of a religious revolution. Exhaustively researched, engagingly written, Raccoon John Smith is the first objective and painstakingly accurate treatment of the legendary frontier preacher. The intricacies behind the development of both Smith's personal religious beliefs and the founding of the Christian Church are treated with equal care. Raccoon John Smith is the story of a single man, but in carefully examining the events and people that influenced Elder Smith, this book also serves as a formative history for several Christian denominations, as well as an account of the wild, early years of the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

Originally inhabited by Native American tribes, territorial Mississippi has a complex history rife with fierce contention. Since 1540, when Hernando de Soto of Spain journeyed across the Atlantic and became the first European to stumble across its borders