James Boyd (1732-1798) immigrated in 1756 from Kilmarnock, Scotland to Newbury, Massachusetts, and married (1) Susanna Coffin in 1757, and (2) Abigail Bulfinch in 1791. Descendants and relatives lived in New England, New York, Minnesota, Mississippi, Louisiana and elsewhere. Includes various lineages of ancestry to the early 1100s and to the mid-800s A.D. in Scotland, England and elsewhere.

In 1861, brothers Daniel and Pressley Boyd left their farm in Abbeville County, South Carolina to join the Confederate army. William, Thomas and Andrew soon followed, along with brother-in-law Fenton Hall. During the Civil War, they collectively fought in almost every theater of the conflict and saw firsthand every aspect of soldier life--from death and illness to friendly fire and desertion. By war's end only Daniel survived. Based on their extensive personal correspondence, this updated edition includes 30 never before published letters, along with new research revealing additional family background and undiscovered information about the fates of the Boyd brothers and other family members.

Boyd, more than any other person, saved fighter aviation from the predations of the Strategic Air Command. His manual of fighter tactics changed the way every air force in the world flies and fights. He discovered a physical theory that forever altered the way fighter planes were designed. Later in life, he developed a theory of military strategy that has been adopted throughout the world and even applied to business models for maximizing efficiency. And in one of the stories of modern military history, the Air Force fighter pilot taught the U.S. Marine Corps how to fight war on the ground. His ideas led to America's swift and decisive victory in the Gulf War and foretold the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

A small neighborhood in northern Frankfort, Kentucky, Crawfish Bottom was located on fifty acres of swampy land along the Kentucky River. “Craw’s” reputation for vice, violence, moral corruption, and unsanitary conditions made it a target for urban renewal projects that replaced the neighborhood with the city’s Capital Plaza in the mid-1960s. Douglas A. Boyd’s Crawfish Bottom: Recovering a Lost Kentucky Community traces the evolution of the controversial community that ultimately saw four-hundred families displaced. Using oral histories and firsthand memories, Boyd not only provides a record of a vanished neighborhood and its culture but also demonstrates how this type of study enhances the historical record. A former Frankfort police officer describes Craw’s residents as a “rough class of people, who didn’t mind killing or being killed.” In Crawfish Bottom, the former residents of Craw acknowledge the popular misconceptions about their community but offer a richer and more balanced view of the past.