The imminent American historian and author of A History of Kentucky shares his life story, spanning the twentieth century.When Thomas D. Clark was hired to teach history at the University of Kentucky in 1931, he began a career that would span nearly three-quarters of a century and would profoundly change not only the history department and the university but the entire Commonwealth. His still-definitive A History of Kentucky (1937) was on...

In the fall of 1829, young Robert Wilmot Scott rode away from Frankfort, Kentucky, on a trip that would take him through nine states. His journal entries about those travels present a vivid picture of Jacksonian America and of the prominent people of that era. Excellent pen portraits of James and Dolly Madison, James Monroe, John Marshall, James Buchanan, Sam Houston, Edward Everett, John C. Calhoun, John Randolph, John Quincy Adams, and others show Scott to be a careful and detailed obser...

In the fall of 1829, young Robert Wilmot Scott rode away from Frankfort, Kentucky, on a trip that would take him through nine states. His journal entries about those travels present a vivid picture of Jacksonian America and of the prominent people of that era. Excellent pen portraits of James and Dolly Madison, James Monroe, John Marshall, James Buchanan, Sam Houston, Edward Everett, John C. Calhoun, John Randolph, John Quincy Adams, and others show Scott to be a careful and detailed obser...

For subsistence farmers in eastern Kentucky, wealthy horse owners in the central Bluegrass, and tobacco growers in Western Kentucky, land was, and continues to be, one of the commonwealth's greatest sources of economic growth. It is also a source of nostalgia for a people devoted to tradition, a characteristic that has significantly influenced Kentucky's culture, sometimes to the detriment of education and development.As timely now as when it was first published, Thomas D. Clark's ...

In the early 1920s, in many a sawmill town across the South, the last quitting-time whistle signaled the cutting of the last log of a company's timber holdings and the end of an era in southern lumbering. It marked the end as well of the great primeval forest that covered most of the South when Europeans first invaded it.Much of the first forest, despite the labors of pioneer loggers, remained intact after the Civil War. But after the restrictions of the Southern Homestead Act were...

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 casual and the serious of American history—fiddlers, yarn spinners, and riverboat gamblers, politicians, educators, and social reformers—have all concerned Thomas D. Clark, celebrated historian of the Western frontier and the changing South. Three American Frontiers, a volume of his selected writings, draws from works produced throughout Clark's long career as a writer, teacher, and lecturer on the frontier West, social change in the South, and the cutting-edge of historical r...

Kentucky history centers on the Bluegrass; this is not to say that the rest of Kentucky does not have a rich story, but chronologically, the beginning was here. Too, Bluegrass history can scarcely be separated from the rest of the state. Boonesboro and Harrodsburg, Henry Clay and Elizabeth Madox Roberts are the cherished possessions of all Kentuckians. Jane Todd Crawford and Dr. Ephraim McDowell stood in for humanity. It is a great matter of local pride that they did so in Kentucky.

From 1826 to 1829, John Bradford, founder of Kentucky's first newspaper, the Kentucky Gazette, reprinted in its pages sixty-six excerpts that he considered important documents on the settlement of the West. Now for the first time all of Bradford's Notes on Kentucky—the primary historical source for Kentucky's early years—are made available in a single volume, edited by the state's most distinguished historian.The Kentucky Gazette was established in 1787 t...

Among the hundreds captivated by the vision of quick riches in the gold fields of California was Elisha Douglass Perkins, a tall handsome youth from Marietta, Ohio, who has here left a remarkable first-hand account of the great trek westward in 1849. Perkins' diary is an unusually full and intimate record of crossing the plains and mountains of the Great West.Extensive notes supplement the text, associating it with numerous other published and unpublished accounts, while an appendi...