Most Hilltoppers believe that Western Kentucky University is unique. They take pride in its lovely campus, its friendly spirit, the loyalty of its alumni, and its academic and athletic achievements. But Western's development also illustrates a major trend in American higher education during the past century. Scores of other institutions have followed the Western pattern, growing from private normal school to state normal school, to teachers college, to general college, finally emerging as an important state university. Historian Lowell Harrison traces the Western story from the school's origin in 1875 to the January 1986 election of its seventh president. For much of its history, Western has been led by paternalistic presidents whose major battles have been with other state schools and parsimonious legislatures. In recent years the presidents have been challenged by students and faculty who have demanded more active roles in university governance, and by a Board of Regents and the Council on Higher Education, which have raised challenging new issues. Harrison's account of the institution's development is laced with anecdotes and vignettes of some of the school's interesting personalities: President Henry Hardin Cherry, whose chapel talks convinced countless students that "the Spirit Makes the Master"; "Uncle Ed" Diddle, whose flying towel and winning teams earned national basketball fame; "Daddy" Bur-ton who could catch flies while lecturing; Miss Gabie Robertson, who held students into the next class period; the lone Japanese student who was on campus during World War II. Harrison also recalls steamboat excursions, the Great Depression and the Second World War, the astounding boom in enrollment and buildings in the 1960s, the period of student unrest, and the numerous fiscal crises that have beset the school. This is the story of an institution proud of its past and seeking to chart its course into the twenty-first century.

This in-depth study offers a new examination of a region that is often overlooked in political histories of the Bluegrass State. George G. Humphreys traces the arc of politics and the economy in western Kentucky from avid support of the Democratic Party to its present-day Republican identity. He demonstrates that, despite its relative geographic isolation, the region west of the eastern boundary of Hancock, Ohio, Butler, Warren, and Simpson Counties to the Mississippi River played significant roles in state and national politics during the New Deal and postwar eras. Drawing on extensive archival research and oral history interviews, Humphreys explores the area's political transformation from a solid Democratic voting bloc to a conservative stronghold by examining how developments such as advances in agriculture, the diversification of the economy, and the civil rights movement affected the region. Addressing notable deficiencies in the existing literature, this impressively researched study will leave readers with a deeper understanding of post-1945 Kentucky politics.

In Hillbilly elegy, J.D. Vance described how his family moved from poverty to an upwardly mobile clan while navigating the collective demons of the past. The book has come to define Appalachia for much of the nation. This collection of essays is a retort, at turns rigorous, critical, angry, and hopeful, to the long shadow cast over the region and its imagining. But it also moves beyond Vance's book to allow Appalachians to tell their own diverse and complex stories of a place that is at once culturally rich and economically distressed, unique and typically American. -- adapted from back cover

This book examines tragedy and tragic philosophy from the Greeks through Shakespeare to the present day. It explores key themes in the links between suffering and ethics through postcolonial literature. Ato Quayson reconceives how we think of World literature under the singular and fertile rubric of tragedy. He draws from many key works – Oedipus Rex, Philoctetes, Medea, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear – to establish the main contours of tragedy. Quayson uses Shakespeare's Othello, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Tayeb Salih, Arundhati Roy, Toni Morrison, Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee to qualify and expand the purview and terms by which Western tragedy has long been understood. Drawing on key texts such as The Poetics and The Nicomachean Ethics, and augmenting them with Frantz Fanon and the Akan concept of musuo (taboo), Quayson formulates a supple, insightful new theory of ethical choice and the impediments against it. This is a major book from a leading critic in literary studies.

Captain Adolph G. Metzner's stunning visual diary of sketches, drawings and watercolors depict his world during three years of service with the First German, Thirty-second Regiment Indiana Volunteer Infantry campaigning in the Western Theater during the Civil War.

"When a man agrees to do a favor for a friend, he gets more than he bargained for as he becomes embroiled in a woman's murder in this new thriller from the USA Today bestselling author of Layover. Ryan Francis has it all--great job, wonderful wife, beautiful child. That is until an old friend, Blake Norton, asks Ryan to help keep his affair a secret by retrieving an incriminating item from the woman's home. Ryan refuses to help, but when Blake threatens to reveal his deepest and darkest secret--which could put everything in Ryan's life in jeopardy--Ryan has no choice. When he arrives at the woman's house, Ryan is shocked to learn two things: he knows the woman Blake is having an affair with, and she is dead on her bedroom floor. With the sound of police sirens rapidly approaching, Ryan flees, wondering why his old friend was setting him up for murder. Determined to keep his life intact and to clear his name, Ryan can't rest until he finds out who the real murderer is--but solving the crime may lead him closer to home than he ever could have imagined"--

The Big Sandy River and its two main tributaries, the Tug and Levisa forks, drain nearly two million mountainous acres in the easternmost part of Kentucky. For generations, the only practical means of transportation and contact with the outside world was the river, and, as The Big Sandy demonstrates, steamboats did much to shape the culture of the region. Carol Crowe-Carraco offers an intriguing and readable account of this region's history from the days of the venturesome Long Hunters of the eighteenth century, through the bitter struggles of the Civil War and its aftermath, up to the 1970s, with their uncertain promise of a new prosperity. The Big Sandy pictures these changes vividly while showing how the turbulent past of the valley lives on in the region's present.

Cutting a wide east-west swath from the Appalachian foothills to the heart of the western Kentucky coalfields, the Green River valley extends from below the Tennessee border in the south to the Ohio River in the north. The Green River of Kentucky presents a picture of the unity and diversity of the people living in the Green River valley. Helen Bartter Crocker finds that each generation of its people approached the river in a distinctive way. Early settlers used the river simply as it was—crooked and narrow with an unpredictable water flow, and navigable only under high-water conditions. The sons of these pioneers were interested in bringing steamboats to the valley; until they succeeded in persuading the state legislature to improve the Green River and its tributary, the Barren, by a series of locks and dams, however, volunteers would work—often up to their necks in water—until they cleared the river sufficiently to allow steamers to reach Bowling Green at high water. When the locks and dams were reopened following the Civil War, a local private corporation gained a near-monopoly of the river trade. Public outcry against this private ownership caused the federal government to take control, and through the Corps of Engineers, to undertake extensive river improvements. After the Great Depression, when trade was almost at a standstill, additional federal funds were appropriated for flood-control dams in the upper river and modern locks in the lower river to harness the valley's industrial potential. These opened up coal barging and recreational facilities, which ensured the future economic well being of the Green River valley.

Once the Enginemen pushed bigships through the cobalt glory of the nada-continuum. But faster than light isn’t fast enough anymore. The interfaces of the Keilor-Vincicoff Organisation bring planets light years distant a simple step away. Then a man with half a face offers ex-Engineman Ralph Mirren the chance to escape his ruined life and push a ship to an undisclosed destination. The nada-continuum holds the key to Ralph’s future. What he cannot anticipate is its universal importance – nor the mystery awaiting him on the distant colony world. Engineman is a thrilling action adventure by the author of Helix and Kethani. Also in this volume are eight stories set in the Engineman universe, including the Interzone award-winning ‘The Time-Lapsed Man.’

The Kentucky Barbecue Book is a feast for readers who are eager to sample the finest fare in the state. From the banks of the Mississippi to the hidden hollows of the Appalachian Mountains, author and barbecue enthusiast Wes Berry hit the trail in search of the best smoke, the best flavor, and the best pitmasters he could find. This handy guide presents the most succulent menus and colorful personalities in Kentucky.