Reference Works
Kentucky in the Civil War: 150 for the 150th, an Annotated Bibliographic Reference
Louisville Civil War Roundtable
Compiled in honor of the Civil War sesquicentennial in 2012, this volume from the Louisville Civil War Roundtable contains a selected bibliography of 150 works on Kentucky's Civil War. Each listed work features annotations offering contextual information. The bibliography is divided into seven categories representing various military, social, and political aspects of the conflict.
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American Civil War:
A State-by-State Encyclopedia
Editors: Spencer C. Tucker;
Paul G. Pierpaoli Jr.
This two-volume set devotes a chapter to each state's role in the Civil War. Included are a timeline of the war, maps of key events, a summary of each state's significance, and alphabetical entries on notable persons, places, and events from each state. Both military and home front matters are addressed. This set may be helpful in gathering basic facts on Civil War era Kentucky and neighboring states, contributing to a regional perspective on the war. Undergraduate researchers and others seeking an accessible introduction to the topic of Kentucky's Civil War drawing on up-to-date scholarship will benefit most from this basic state-level reference work.
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The Oxford Handbook of the American Civil War
Editors: Lorien Foote;
Earl J. Hess
This Oxford-commissioned survey contains 39 essays spanning military campaigns throughout every section of the United States. The handbook uses these campaigns as frameworks to explain the social, political, and cultural ramifications of the Civil War on international, national, and local levels, especially the communities that campaigns moved through and damaged. Two chapters consider the influence of environmental factors on the war in Eastern Kentucky and the Heartland Campaign. Beyond the Kentucky-focused chapters, researchers will find this handbook useful in establishing an understanding of the Civil War's multifaceted influences and impacts in both regional and national contexts, especially as related to understudied or marginalized people such as civilians, women, and Black and Indigenous Americans.
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The Kentucky Encyclopedia
Editor: John E. Kleber
This volume stands as the quintessential ready-reference for factual information on Kentucky's history. Its more than 2,000 entries include biographical, historical, and statistical overviews of people, places, events, and eras that have shaped culture, literature, education, religion, business, and more throughout the state. These include entries on both civilian and combatant Kentuckians in the Civil War as well as the following eras of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and segregation. It may also prove useful for understanding the various towns and communities referenced in other works on the war.
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The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Civil War
William L. Barney
Barney's encyclopedia takes on a national scope. It contains 250 entries, supplemented with maps and photographs, covering biographical sketches and historical overviews of the Civil War's many military, economic, religious, political, social elements. It also features a list of Civil War-related websites, historic sites, and museums. While many of these elements naturally feature information about Kentucky, this volume is most useful as an introduction to the Civil War era, giving necessary national context and background without which more regional studies cannot be fully understood.
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Biographical Register of the Confederate Congress
Ezra J. Warner;
W. Buck Yearns
While Kentucky never formally seceded, Confederate sympathizers organized a state shadow government and sent representatives who were accepted into the Confederate States Congress. This work presents both biographical and bibliographical information on the 267 men who formed the Confederacy's House and Senate, including 22 Kentuckians. Included are details on each person's financial, political, educational, and familial histories.
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Reconstruction: A Historical Encyclopedia of the American Mosaic
Editor: Richard Zuczek
Although no modern reference work currently focuses on Kentucky's role in the Reconstruction era, this encyclopedia is a suitable entry point for study of the time period. Featuring a chronology of Reconstruction, appendices of primary sources, a selected bibliography, and entries covering the social, political, legal, and military complexities of postwar life, this volume offers vital regional and national context and definitions. Researchers seeking a primer to understand the people, events, and concepts covered in monographs and articles on Reconstruction era Kentucky will find this volume helpful.
Monographs
The Civil War in Kentucky
Lowell H. Harrison
Harrison's study represents the classic single-volume treatment on Kentucky's Civil War. This book offers an overview of both regular and irregular fighting throughout the state, internal divisions among Kentucky's population, and the war's socioeconomic consequences. Importantly, Harrison positions the Commonwealth as a region with complex and almost paradoxical loyalties. This work can serve as an entry point to the scholarly literature on Civil War era Kentucky and will help fit more local intrastate studies into context.
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Contested Borderland:
The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia
Brian D. McKnight
Centered on the border between Eastern Kentucky and estern Virginia, McKnight’s study offers an all too rare look at how the Civil War impacted life in Central Appalachia. His book discusses the area’s strategic importance as regular and irregular U.S. and Confederate forces competed to control local natural resources and channels through mountainous terrain like the Cumberland Gap. McKnight complicates the longstanding narrative of stout Unionism in Appalachia, particularly Eastern Kentucky, by highlighting long-lasting and intense divisions among residents who committed themselves to the U.S., the Confederacy, or simply to neutrality and survival.
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Rebels on the Border:
Civil War, Emancipation, and the Reconstruction of Kentucky and Missouri
Aaron Astor
Astor takes a comparative regional lens to the seldom-studied Kentucky-Missouri borderland during both the Civil War and Reconstruction. The author reveals similarities between how African Americans mobilized in each state to ensure their newfound enfranchisement and citizenship. At the same time, Astor draws on manuscripts, legal records, and newspaper to demonstrate how former white Unionists joined Democratic ranks alongside ex-Confederates and employed both political and violent means to retain control over Black citizens.
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Black Liberation in Kentucky:
Emancipation and Freedom, 1862-1884
Victor B. Howard
Howard assesses the sociopolitical opportunities and challenges that emerged in post-emancipation Kentucky. After reviewing race relations in the antebellum period, the author describes both white and Black Kentuckians' responses to federal emancipation policies, enslaved persons' various paths to escape enslavement, and intervention from both the U.S. Army and Freedmen's Bureau. He documents white resistance to the enfranchisement of African Americans during Reconstruction as well as Black citizens' fights for civil rights, suffrage, employment, education, and other elements of full participation in Kentucky society during the early Jim Crow era.
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Creating a Confederate Kentucky:
The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State
Anne E. Marshall
Taking a long view of the subject, Marshall examines how white Kentuckians constructed a pro-Confederate identity which dominated the memorial landscape between 1865 and 1925. Her study considers public commemorations, social and veterans’ organizations, education and literature, and violence and political actions as multifaceted means through which that identity was codified socially, culturally, and legally. Importantly, the work also reveals how pro-Union and Black Kentuckians sought to posit their own memorial narratives as they navigated the postwar period, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow era.
Perryville: This Grand Havoc of Battle
Kenneth W. Noe
Mixing traditional military campaign narrative with social and cultural history, Noe’s study details Kentucky’s largest battle which saw the end of Confederate General Braxton Bragg’s failed Heartland Campaign in October 1862. The book contextualizes the Battle of Perryville within the broader fight to secure previously neutral Kentucky for either the Union or the Confederacy. In addition to maneuvers and tactics, Noe explores Perryville’s impact on the local community and memory in Kentucky.
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The Rivers Ran Backward:
The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border
Christopher Phillips
Complicating the assumption that Kentucky’s loyalties and identity have rested with the South since its founding, Phillips’ work situates the state within the regional context of the first American West. His study argues against a simple North-South dichotomy, replacing it with a nuanced interpretation of regional identities in the Ohio River Valley which posits that, until the Civil War, residents of Kentucky and Missouri held common social, cultural, and economic ties as Western states while those in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio were more closely aligned with the South ideologically and culturally. Phillips delineates how Civil War era violence and internal strife among governments, social organizations, and everyday people alike over slavery, race, religion, nationalism, and sectionalism transmuted people’s regional loyalties and senses of self in the Ohio Valley borderland.
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Camp Nelson, Kentucky:
A Civil War History
Richard D. Sears
Kentucky produced more Black troops in the Civil War than any other state besides Louisiana. Thousands of those recruits trained at Camp Nelson, located by the Kentucky River in Jessamine County. Sears offers a full treatment of the installation's history. Using correspondence, newspapers, and military records, Sears covers how the site transformed from a U.S. supply depot into one of the country's largest recruiting stations for the United States Colored Troops. This work provides insight into the process of emancipation for Black Kentuckians, race relations both within and outside military ranks, the development of a community of soldiers' families at Camp Nelson, and the establishment of a small postwar settlement after the camp's deactivation.
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Wright analyzes patterns of violence against Black citizens in Kentucky. Tying the motivations for widespread violence to white backlash against emancipation at the end of the Civil War, the author traces the social and legal evolution of lynching practices in the state to the mid-twentieth century. Legal records reveal how some white authorities deemed many such killings "justifiable homicides" and effectively ordained both state and mob violence against Black Kentuckians who attempted to assert their social or political equality. Crucially, Wright also highlights efforts to curtail racial violence and enforce Black citizens' rights.
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Harlow builds on Marshall's work by more closely examining religious debates over slavery and race in Kentucky throughout the antebellum, wartime, and postwar eras. The author delineates theological developments among Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists and internal divides between white Christians who used their beliefs to advance pro-slavery, gradualist, or immediate emancipationist arguments. Ultimately, Harlow posits that the abolition of slavery and active participation of Black Kentuckians in public religion provoked severe white backlash and consolidated many white Kentuckians' pro-Confederate identity.