Between Barkley and Kentucky Lakes—two great, artificial bodies of water in western Tennessee and western Kentucky—lies a wooded land that looks from above like the flattened thumb of a green giant. Once a land of marginal farms and small settlements, this 240-square-mile peninsula, known as the Land Between the Lakes, has been a national recreation area for the last half-century. Its rolling, wooded hills and open bottomlands give the place charm but little majesty. The place swallows up its few campgrounds and visitors they attracts, creating a vacuous tranquility. In this volume, Foresta explores how this forgotten and bypassed region became a national recreation area. He uses its history to retrieve our old attitudes toward nature, progress, and personal development. He also uses its history to retrieve a vision of the future that rallied idealists, intellectuals, and even public officials to its banner. In the early 1960s, the Tennessee Valley Authority set out to create a great park for posterity at the Land Between the Lakes. The park was to host the vast stretches of leisure that wealthy, secure, and more equal Americans of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries would have at their disposal. It would be a place where such Americans could turn that leisure into happiness, psychic well-being, and strength of character. The TVA cleared the land of its inhabitants to create the park, removing people from their homes and severing their roots, thus effacing the history of the place. It then set about reshaping the land in the image of an anticipated future. But when that future never arrived, managers struggled to fit the place to the America that actually came into being. In the end they failed, leaving the Land Between the Lakes enveloped in a haunting sense of emptiness. A deft blend of environmental history, geography, politics, and cultural history, Land Between the Lakes demonstrates both the idealism of mid-twentieth-century planners and how quickly such idealism can fall out of alignment with the flow of history. In so doing it explores a forgotten vision of the future that was in many ways more appealing than the present that came into being in its place.

A Preachers Tales is a book about preachers who are unusual, sometimes eccentric people. Buchanan is one of them. In fact, a little bit of him is to be found in many, if not most of them. Buchanan is tolerant of all of them, and a few of them he even loves, or likes because they are so much like him. The prime redeeming feature in all of them is humor. Some of the things the preachers do and say are downright funny, but mostly the humor is subtle and only crops up after the reader has read and thought and reflected on what happened and what was told. Its not all humorous. Preaching is a serious business. The Preacher deals with a profound issue. He is holding Gods Hand with one hand and a mans hand with the other. What the preacher says and does may determine the course of human events because in some measure it reflects or communicates the mind and the saving grace of God. Behold here the Preacher Man at work and at play.

Storytelling has been an art and form of entertainment for many cultures for thousands of years. Every family has their special stories. In this way culture is created and passed down to future generations. The stories in this collection represent five generations of our family. Our family would sit around a dinner table or a campfire and tell and retell these stories from the past. Our family loved the sharing of humor through this special communication. In this way we also shared each other’s lives. My family has asked that I record these so that they will be passed on to future generations so that they might enjoy them as well. All of the stories elicit laughter because of the humor. The stories are organized around themes. The one thing that is constant about the stories is that they are all “true stories”.

Vernon and Irene Castle popularized ragtime dancing in the years just before World War I and made dancing a respectable pastime in America. The whisper-thin, elegant Castles were trendsetters in many ways: they traveled with a black orchestra, had an openly lesbian manager, and were animal-rights advocates decades before it became a public issue. Irene was also a fashion innovator, bobbing her hair ten years before the flapper look of the 1920s became popular. From their marriage in 1911 until 1916, the Castles were the most famous and influential dance team in the world. Their dancing schools and nightclubs were packed with society figures and white-collar workers alike. After their peak of white-hot fame, Vernon enlisted in the Royal Canadian Flying Corps, served at the front lines, and was killed in a 1918 airplane crash. Irene became a movie star and appeared in more than a dozen films between 1917 and 1922. The Castles were depicted in the Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers movie The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939), but the film omitted most of the interesting and controversial aspects of their lives. They were more complex than posterity would have it: Vernon was charming but irresponsible, Irene was strong-minded but self-centered, and the couple had filed for divorce before Vernon’s death (information that has never before been made public). Vernon and Irene Castle’s Ragtime Revolution is the fascinating story of a couple who reinvented dance and its place in twentieth-century culture.

Land Between the Lakes Recreation Area lies in western Kentucky and Tennessee, between two huge lakes formed by dams on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers. Some 170,000 acres bounded by 300 miles of shoreline, Land Between the Lakes is blessed with a rich variety of plant and animal life. Conceived and administrated by the Tennessee Valley Authority, it is a unique recreational experiment which has drawn admiring visitors from around the world. Frank E. Smith, director of TVA, tells the story of the transformation of submarginal land into a large-scale, multiple-use recreation facility that provides recreation and entertainment for thousands of visitors as well as producing a positive, dynamic stimulus to the continued economic development of the entire Tennessee Valley. Planned for fullest use of human and land resources, Land Between the Lakes is of utmost importance to recreational planners, conservation specialists, administrators, and to millions of Americans who seek their recreation in the out of doors.

This is a series of short stories written by the Writer/Storyteller/Time Traveler sharing his findings after visiting five different Worlds. Each World is a Chapter. Chapter One, will be covering a period of time from 1937, through World War Two and into the new age of the 1950's. An only child's perception of the world around him. Chapter Two, will be stories about the beginning of the 50's into the 60's. The Time Traveler will be growing into a different person than he was in the beginning. Chapter Three, The Time Traveler is a State Trooper. This will be a series of Police & Investigation Stories as the Time Traveler/Writer begins to change his beliefs. The world of the Time Traveler will change and he begins his travels into yet, another world, one most do not realize it exists. Chapter Four and Five, in these Chapters the Time Travelers enters the world of Greed, Deception, and selfness. It will be about truths about life, what it is, and how it relates to each person.