From its origins in the Cumberland Mountains to its entry into the Ohio, the Kentucky River flows through two areas that have made Kentucky known throughout the world—the mountains in the eastern part of the state and the Bluegrass in its center. In The Kentucky, Thomas D. Clark paints a rich panorama of history and life along the river, peopled with the famous and infamous, ordinary folk and legendary characters. It is a canvas distinctly emblematic of the American experience. The Kentucky was first published in 1942 as part of the "Rivers of America" series and has long been out of print. Reissued in this new enlarged edition, it brings back to life a distinguished contribution to Kentuckiana and is itself a historical document. In his new conclusion for this edition, Dr. Clark discusses some of the tremendous changes that have taken place since the book's initial publication.

In 1799, Revolutionary War veteran General Green Clay finished construction on a stately Georgian mansion he named Clermont. The home became a statewide symbol of prosperity, housing the farm of one of the largest landowners in the Commonwealth. Renamed White Hall by Cassius Marcellus Clay and renovated by his wife, Mary Jane Warfield Clay, it remained in the family for generations. Here Cassius Clay became known as the "Lion of White Hall," penning his fiery speeches against slavery and launching his tumultuous career as an outspoken statesman. After years of restoration, White Hall became a state historic site in 1971. Now, A History of White Hall offers a detailed look inside this expertly preserved structure and the people who helped shape its fascinating history.

The “magisterial” (The New York Times Book Review) second volume of Sidney Blumenthal’s acclaimed, landmark biography, The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, reveals the future president’s genius during the most decisive period of his political life when he seizes the moment, finds his voice, and helps create a new political party. In 1849, Abraham Lincoln seems condemned to political isolation and defeat. His Whig Party is broken in the 1852 election, and disintegrates. His perennial rival, Stephen Douglas, forges an alliance with the Southern senators and Secretary of War Jefferson Davis. Violent struggle breaks out on the plains of Kansas, a prelude to the Civil War. Lincoln rises to the occasion. Only he can take on Douglas in Illinois. He finally delivers the dramatic speech that leaves observers stunned. In 1855, he makes a race for the Senate against Douglas, which he loses when he throws his support to a rival to prevent the election of a proslavery candidate. In Wrestling With His Angel, Sidney Blumenthal explains how Lincoln and his friends operate behind the scenes to destroy the anti-immigrant party in Illinois to clear the way for a new Republican Party. Lincoln takes command and writes its first platform and vaults onto the national stage as the leader of a party that will launch him to the presidency. The Washington Monthly hailed Blumenthal’s Volume I as, “splendid…no one can come away from reading A Self-Made Man without eagerly anticipating the ensuing volumes.” Pulitzer Prize–winning author Diane McWhorter hailed Volume II as “dramatic narrative history, prophetic and intimate.” Wrestling With His Angel brings Lincoln from the wilderness to the peak of his career as he is determined to enter into the battle for the nation’s soul and to win it for democracy.

The emancipationist Cassius M. Clay has long been one of Kentucky's most controversial and misunderstood figures. This new biography examines his important, though undervalued, place in history from the anti-slavery movement to his role in Lincoln's minister to Russia during the Civil War. Along the way the many fights, romantic entanglements, and political battes of Clay's life are explored. The author, a former guide at Clay's mansion, White Hall, unearthed long forgotten documents such as newspaper and magazine articles, interviews with Clay, and family letters. As a result this book contains much information found in no other Clay biography and many long-standing myths are debunked. In addition to the biography of Clay, the book contains a room-by-room tour of White Hall, several informative appendices, and a collection of ghost stories concerning Clay's mansion, making it both ideal for history buffs and the public at large.

Appointed by Abraham Lincoln to the U.S. Supreme Court during the Civil War, Samuel Freeman Miller (1816--1890) served on the nation's highest tribunal for twenty-eight tumultuous years and holds a place in legal history as one of the Court's most influential justices. Michael A. Ross creates a colorful portrait of a passionate man grappling with the difficult legal issues arising from a time of wrenching social and political change. He also explores the impact President Lincoln's Supreme Court appointments made on American constitutional history. Best known for his opinions in cases dealing with race and the Fourteenth Amendment, particularly the 1873 Slaughter-House Cases, Miller has often been considered a misguided opponent of Reconstruction and racial equality. In this major reinterpretation, Ross argues that historians have failed to study the evolution of Miller's views during the war and explains how Miller, a former slaveholder, became a champion of African Americans' economic and political rights. He was also the staunchest supporter of the Court of Lincoln's controversial war measures, including the decision to suspend such civil liberties as habeas corpus. Although commonly portrayed as an agrarian folk hero, Miller in fact initially foresaw and embraced a future in which frontier and rivertown settlements would bloom into thriving metropolises. The optimistic vision grew from the free-labor ideology Miller brought to the Iowa Republican Party he helped found, one that celebrated ordinatry citizens' right to rise in station an driches. Disillusioned by the eventual failure of the boomtowns and repelled by the swelling coffers of eastern financiers, corporations, and robber barons, Miller became an insistent judicial voice for western Republicans embittered and marginalized in the Gilded Age. The first biography of Miller since 1939, this welcome volume draws on Miller's previously unavailable papers to shed new light on a man who saw his dreams for America shattered but whose essential political and social values, as well as his personal integrity, remained intact.

In Kentucky, the slavery debate raged for thirty years before the Civil War began. While whites in the lower South argued that slavery was good for master and slave, many white Kentuckians maintained that because of racial prejudice, public safety, and property rights, slavery was necessary but undeniably evil. Harold D. Tallant shows how this view bespoke a real ambivalence about the desirability of continuing slavery in Kentucky and permitted an active abolitionist movement in the state to exist alongside contented slaveholders. Though many Kentuckians were increasingly willing to defend slavery against northern opposition, they did not always see this defense as their first political priority. Tallant explores the way in which the disparity between Kentuckians' ideals and their actions helped make Kentucky a quintessential border state.

Did you know that William Goebel of Kentucky remains the only state governor to be assassinated while in office? Or that Abraham Lincoln, now a favorite son of the Bluegrass State, garnered less than 1 percent of the state's vote in 1860? How about Matthew Lyon, the congressman who won reelection from a jail cell and once bit off the thumb of a voter during a brawl on the House floor? These are but three of the fascinating and little-known stories from Kentucky's political past found in True Tales of Old-Time Kentucky Politics. Join longtime columnist Berry Craig as he shares tales of a time when votes could be bought with a drink and political differences were resolved with ten paces and a pistol.