A New History of Kentucky by James C. Klotter and Craig Thompson Friend

Abstract

Reviewed by: A New History of Kentuckyby James C. Klotter and Craig Thompson Friend A. Glenn Crothers (bio) A New History of Kentucky, 2nded. By James C. Klotter and Craig Thompson Friend. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2018. Pp. xviii, 563. $44.95 cloth) Kentucky has not lacked in histories of the state. As early as 1874 Richard H. Collins published his two-volume A History of Kentucky, a chronicle of data about the state to that date. Numerous state histories followed in Collins's wake, including William Elsey Connelly and E. Merton Coulter's 1922 five-volume treatment, Temple Bodley and Samuel M. Wilson's 1928 four-volume effort, Thomas D. Clark's lengthy one-volume history, first published in 1937, and Steven Channing's more accessible 1977 survey. The 1997 publication of Lowell H. Harrison and James C. Klotter's A New History of Kentuckynonetheless represented a significant historiographical moment, providing readers a comprehensive overview of the state's history by two of its most respected historians. In the twenty years since, however, historians of Kentucky were busy and the second edition of A New History of Kentucky, with Craig Thompson Friend taking on the years before 1865 (Harrison passed away in 2011) and Klotter covering the years thereafter, offers readers a text that reflects both recent scholarship and brings the story up to the twenty-first century (though a county map, which appeared in the front endpaper of the first edition, is oddly omitted). In accessible prose, Friend and Klotter's text recounts Kentucky's history from its earliest Native American residents to the election of Republican Governor Matt Bevin in 2015. Friend's portion of A New History of Kentucky—the first nine chapters—constitutes more than a revision of the fourteen chapters Harrison contributed to the first edition. Though he covers the same time period, Friend has reorganized, rethought, and re-contextualized the material, in the process offering a fresh and much needed [End Page 317]reinterpretation of early Kentucky history. Though politics remains a primary concern, Friend's portion of the text reflects the way historians broadened their approach to studying the past, making the histories they tell richer and more inclusive. This change is apparent from the opening pages of A New History of Kentucky, where Friend includes an account of the first settlement of the state by Indigenous peoples and the ways Native American societies changed in the centuries before Europeans invaded (rather than explored) the region. Likewise, and again reflecting recent scholarship, Friend reframes eighteenth-century Kentucky as a "middle ground," a place where a diverse range of humans mingled, worked, disagreed, and figured "out how to live with each other," rather than as a "frontier" in which "uncivilized" Native Americans retreated before European invaders (pp. 18–19). Including the Indigenous perspective enables Friend to present the violence in the early Ohio Valley from the Seven Years' War through the War of 1812 as a product of Native American efforts to retain their homeland. Friend's narrative also emphasizes how changing concepts of gender—both femininity and masculinity—and honor shaped the cultural, military, and political life of early and antebellum Kentucky. Gender, Friend reveals, influenced everything from the military tactics employed by early Kentuckians, to the expectations, limitations, and life trajectories of frontier and antebellum women, to the decisions and appeals of politicians (including their propensity for violence). Friend also includes useful discussions of the increasing refinement of antebellum Kentucky society, the influence of romanticism on the state, and the importance of religious revivalism. Equally important, Friend emphasizes the significance of slavery in Kentucky from the earliest days of European settlement and the experience and resistance of enslaved people. He rejects the canard—repeated by generations of state historians—that slavery was somehow more "mild" in Upper South states like Kentucky (p. 125). "Slavery," Friend emphatically states, "was a brutal system" that denied the humanity of its victims and subjected them to lives of unremitting toil and frequent violence (p. 123). The destruction of Black families as a [End Page 318]result of the growing interstate slave trade—before the system's demise slaveholders forcibly removed over...