Scholarly Articles
Bingham, E. (2019). “Let’s buy it!”: Tourism and the My Old Kentucky Home campaign in Jim Crow Kentucky. Ohio Valley History, 19(3), 27–56. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/734800
Bingham's research reveals the racial undertones of Stephen Foster's My Old Kentucky Home, today the state song, and its use in creating a nostalgic vision of Kentucky's past. The author describes the early twentieth-century campaign to purchase Federal Hill plantation, the site which supposedly inspired Foster's song, and transform it into My Old Kentucky Home State Park. Bingham contextualizes these efforts and the emergence of heritage tourism in the Bluegrass within the development of white Kentuckians' Civil War memory and identity. Ultimately, she argues that the site and song were appropriated to create a reconciliationist memory which painted nineteenth-century Kentucky as an idyllic Old South state where slavery existed in a benevolent form.
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Lee, J. F. (2009). Whether it really be truth or fiction: Colonel Reuben T. Durrett, the Filson Club, and historical memory in postbellum Kentucky. Ohio Valley History, 9(4), 27–47. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/570740/
Lee's article links the 1884 founding of the Filson Club (today the Filson Historical Society) in Louisville to the construction of Kentucky's Civil War memory. Founding members included both Unionists and ex-Confederates. Lee posits that the organization's decision to publish almost exclusively on Kentucky's "pioneer" history from the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, and promote commemoration of that period, fostered white reconciliation by focusing on an era during which white Kentuckians were socially and politically united.
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Lewis, P. A. (2010). The Democratic Partisan Militia and the Black Peril: The Kentucky Militia, racial violence, and the Fifteenth Amendment, 1870-1873. Civil War History, 56(2), 145–174. https://doi.org/10.1353/cwh.0.0147
Lewis provides a look into white resistance to Black equality and the establishment of a new social order in Reconstruction era Kentucky. Focusing on the early 1870s, Lewis positions the Kentucky state militia as effectively a state-sanctioned complement to the Ku Klux Klan. He details how young white militiamen, too young to have served during the Civil War, attempted to use the state's postwar military power to intimidate Black voters and Republicans, maintain the Democratic Party's grip over Kentucky politics, and gain status and praise as "protectors" of white society.
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Marshall, A. E. (2012). A “sisters’ war”: Kentucky women and their Civil War diaries. Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, 110(3-4), 481–502. https://doi.org/10.1353/khs.2012.0070
Marshall’s article offers a gendered perspective on the Civil War in Kentucky. Drawing on the diaries of both Unionist women like Josie Underwood and Confederate sympathizers like Lizzie Hardin, Marshall reveals shared experiences and themes which indicate how white women in the bluegrass navigated divided loyalties and frequent threats to their homes. The author highlights the prevalence of guerrilla warfare in the state to argue that, even more so than elsewhere in the country, Kentucky women acted as combatants both through direct violence in defense of their communities as well as intelligence gathering and relay of critical information to military forces.
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Rhyne, J. M. (2006). A “murderous affair in Lincoln County”: Politics, violence, and memory in a Civil War era Kentucky community. American Nineteenth Century History, 7(3), 337–359. https://doi.org/10.1080/14664650600956528
Rhyne's case study investigates the construction of memory in postwar Kentucky. He details the 1867 assassination of U.S. veteran and Freedmen's Bureau agent James H. Bridgewater in Stanford. Drawing on newspapers, correspondence, and legal and military records, Rhyne contextualizes Bridgewater's murder within the state's Reconstruction era history of racially and politically motivated intimidation and violence intended to consolidate white citizens' power over Black Kentuckians. Beyond examining the actions of the perpetrators themselves, Rhyne reveals how local papers legitimized such violence and posited anti-federal and anti-Black definitions of citizenship.
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Rubin, A. S. (2019). “Literally destroyed as a housekeeper”: Hunger and hardship in Civil War Kentucky. Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, 117(2), 215–228. https://doi.org/10.1353/khs.2019.0058
Rubin combines social and culinary history to examine the role of food in the lives of white Kentucky civilians during the Civil War. Drawing largely on correspondence and petitions to the governors' offices, she compares food scarcity and hunger in the Commonwealth to the situation of civilians in the Confederacy. Rubin argues that food came to be both a status symbol and indicator of allegiance.
Somers, L. R. (2022). How emancipation redefined white loyalty in Civil War Kentucky. Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, 120(3-4), 275–299. https://doi.org/10.1353/khs.2022.a899961
Somers explores how pro-slavery Unionists in Kentucky reacted to federal emancipation policies. Analyzing manuscripts and legal records, he demonstrates that many white Kentuckians in part supported the U.S. not because they wished to see slavery eradicated but because they thought slavery could best be maintained with Kentucky remaining in the Union. Somers offers fresh research indicating the anger, backlash, and shifting loyalties in the bluegrass following implementation of “contraband” policies, recruitment of United States Colored Troops, liberation of USCT service members’ families, and ultimately the abolition of slavery under the Thirteenth Amendment.
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Taylor, A. M. (2019). Texts and textiles in Civil War Kentucky. Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, 117(2), 229–244. https://doi.org/10.1353/khs.2019.0061
Taylor’s research demonstrates the importance of material culture in the study of Civil War era Kentucky. Arguing that clothing became a “‘distinguishing mark’ of position” during wartime, Taylor analyzes how Kentuckians talked about clothing, and social and legal actions which stemmed from perceptions of the clothes residents wore, through correspondence sent to Kentucky’s governors. She outlines both civilian and military case studies such as two enslaved persons who used dresses and veils to disguise their gender and race while attempting to flee from Kentucky to Indiana, as well as stories of Confederate partisans regularly raiding men’s and women’s clothing from residences and stores alike. Ultimately, Taylor’s work offers insight into how clothing signaled race, class, gender, loyalty, and free or enslaved status.
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Wallenstein, P. (2012). Pioneer Black legislators from Kentucky, 1860s-1960s. Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, 110(3-4), 533–557. https://doi.org/10.1353/khs.2012.0052
Wallenstein's article indicates the political progress and enfranchisement of Black Kentuckians after the Civil War. He details the lives and achievements of African Americans who sought and won state office. He contextualizes these histories within postwar racial migrations out of Kentucky, and identifies Black Kentuckians who went on to serve as some of the country's first Black legislators in other states.