Discover the German influence on the Derby City in this collection of historical essays. The first German immigrants arrived in Louisville nearly two hundred years ago. By 1850, they represented nearly twenty percent of the population, and they influenced every aspect of daily life, from politics to fine art. In 1861, Moses Levy opened the famed Levy Brothers department store. Kunz’s “The Dutchman” Restaurant was established as a wholesale liquor establishment in 1892 and then became a delicatessen and, finally, a restaurant in 1941. Carl Christian Brenner, an emigrant from Lauterecken, Bavaria, gained notoriety as the most important Kentucky landscape artist of the nineteenth century. C. Robert and Victoria A. Ullrich edit a collection of historical essays about German immigrants and their fascinating past in the Derby City.

With more than 1,800 entries, The Encyclopedia of Louisville is the ultimate reference for Kentucky's largest city. For more than 125 years, the world's attention has turned to Louisville for the annual running of the Kentucky Derby on the first Saturday in May. Louisville Slugger bats still reign supreme in major league baseball. The city was also the birthplace of the famed Hot Brown and Benedictine spread, and the cheeseburger made its debut at Kaelin's Restaurant on Newburg Road in 1934. The "Happy Birthday" had its origins in the Louisville kindergarten class of sisters Mildred Jane Hill and Patty Smith Hill. Named for King Louis XVI of France in appreciation for his assistance during the Revolutionary War, Louisville was founded by George Rogers Clark in 1778. The city has been home to a number of men and women who changed the face of American history. President Zachary Taylor was reared in surrounding Jefferson County, and two U.S. Supreme Court Justices were from the city proper. Second Lt. F. Scott Fitzgerald, stationed at Camp Zachary Taylor during World War I, frequented the bar in the famous Seelbach Hotel, immortalized in The Great Gatsby. Muhammad Ali was born in Louisville and won six Golden Gloves tournaments in Kentucky.

With the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Louisville mobilized to fight Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Citizens of all races and economic classes united in the effort, both abroad and at home. Louisvilles many industries banded together as well: the Mengel Company made wood products used in the war, and its staff burned a Nazi flag in an employee-held rally; Reynolds Aluminum Company manufactured arms and other war materials; Liberty National Bank sold war bonds at special windows; and the Louisville Ford Motor Company made at least 93,389 military jeeps out of the roughly 500,000 employed in the war. Perhaps Louisvilles most significant war contribution, though, was the use of Bowman Field as a United States Army Air Corps Detachment Squadron. The pilots trained there were vital to the war effort.

"The first German immigrants in Louisville were shoemakers, bakers, butchers, blacksmiths and brewers--literally everything from basket makers to carriage manufacturers. Later, these industrious immigrants became captains of industry and influence in the city. August Prante's family built many of the magnificent organs for Louisville churches. Abraham Flexner was a pioneer in medical education, while Louis Brandeis was the first Jew to serve on the United States Supreme Court. William George Stuber, the son of Louisville photographer Michael Stuber, became the president of the Eastman Kodak Company. C. Robert Ullrich and Victoria A. Ullrich present a series of essays detailing how German immigrants shaped the industry and culture of Louisville." -- Page 4 of cover.

Insiders' Guide to Louisville is the essential source for in-depth travel and relocation information to this storied Kentucky city. Written by a local (and true insider), this guide offers a personal and practical perspective of Louisville and its surrounding environs.

A forty-five-square-block neighborhood in the heart of Kentucky’s largest city, Old Louisville is among the largest and most significant historic preservation districts in America. Comprising some 1,400 structures built primarily between 1885 and 1905, it is a veritable time capsule of late-Victorian and early twentieth-century architecture. The broad avenues and quiet courts of this beautifully embowered space are lined with notable examples of Gothic Revival, Richardsonian Romanesque, Queen Anne, Italianate, Châteauesque, Second Empire, and Beaux Arts dwellings typifying the style and elegance of the Gilded Age. Located just south of Louisville’s business district, Old Louisville arose from the expansive grounds where the great Southern Exposition amazed and inspired visitors from 1883 to 1887. Coinciding with the economic growth of this expanding river city, the development of Old Louisville reflected the exuberance of its patrons and their architects as many of the designs combined various elements of diverse styles with sometimes whimsical and often strikingly delightful results. Old Louisville: Exuberant, Elegant, and Alive takes an intimate tour of fifty residential designs, from grand mansions to cozy cottages, from familiar house museums and boutique hotel adaptations to private homes of charm and sophistication. Many of these residences havenever been opened to the curious eyes of readers who are fascinated with old homes and interior design and intrigued by the skill and imagination necessary to rescue endangered buildings and convert them to the needs and comforts of modern living. Old Louisville is alive today with the busy activities of commerce and creativity. It is abuzz with people heading off to work at an office downtown or to a studio downstairs, while next door or down the block new neighbors are hunkering down to restore an old gem from a bygone era. Street fairs and art festivals roll with the vitality of contemporary life in a historic setting, and the pleasant sounds of Derby party celebrants mingle with the echoes of those now past. Old Louisville celebrates the architectural context of this remarkable neighborhood and commemorates the passion and the dedication of those who have recognized the value of its past and have sacrificed to preserve the certainty of its future.

National Book Award Finalist: Never before has the mentality of the average German under the Nazi regime been made as intelligible to the outsider.” —The New York TImes They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Milton Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” These ten men were not men of distinction, according to Mayer, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune. A new foreword to this edition by eminent historian of the Reich Richard J. Evans puts the book in historical and contemporary context. We live in an age of fervid politics and hyperbolic rhetoric. They Thought They Were Free cuts through that, revealing instead the slow, quiet accretions of change, complicity, and abdication of moral authority that quietly mark the rise of evil.