struggles over slavery and abolition. As it turned out, some of Fee's northern friends, previously so outspoken on behalf of blacks and so important in the Utopian experiment during the early years, did not truly accept Fee's ideas. Objections to social equality for blacks and questions concerning doctrinal differences resulted in a steady exodus northward; new workers seemed even less convinced of Fee's goals. Nevertheless, Fee's hopes for a fully integrated college and community seemed within his grasp until 1890, when changes in leadership quickly undermined his Utopian dream. In the end, Sears reminds us, the entire experiment lasted a mere twenty-five years. After 1892 Fee, relegated to the sidelines , watched his experiment wane. Thoughtful and provocative, A Utopian Experiment in Kentucky is Sears's best book, and required reading for those interested in the early days of the Berea experiment. —Marion B. Lucas Arnow, Harriette Simpson. Flowering of the Cumberland. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. Bison Books Edition, a reprint of a 1963 book. Paperback $17.95. Tobin, Juanita Brown. Ransom Street Quartet: Poems and Stories. Boone, North Carolina: Parkway Publishers, 1995. $14.95. York, John. Johnny's Cosmology. 38 pages. $8.95. May be ordered from The Hummingbird Press, P.O. Box 7301, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 27109-7301. The University of Nebraska Press has given us a gift by republishing Harriette Simpson Arnow's Flowering ofthe Cumberland. Though much has changed in the fields ofhistory writing and literary non-fiction in the intervening decades, rereading Arnow reminds us that good prose is always in style and that good stories never die. And her story is a good one. In this volume, Arnow's purpose was to continue telling the saga of the pioneers who settled the Cumberland Valley during the period of 1780 to 1803 (with a liberal spillover before and after). Her 1960 volume, Seedtime on the Cumberland, had already related the stories of the individual men and women who made that trek and lived the frontier life; this companion volume is not a sequel, but a different kind ofhistory. Though many ofthe same persons appear, this 65 work centers on the society that was developing, the social history of that time and place. As the author states, it deals with "the pioneer as a member of society engaged in those activities which, different from hunting or house-building, could not be performed by a lone man or family." Thus we learn about the Cumberland pioneers in such areas as industry , trade, local politics, culture, education, and recreation. Drawing on inestimable hours spent poring through court records, bills of sale, traders ' inventories, early newspapers, unpublished manuscripts, and a variety of other documents, Arnow reveals the day-to-day interactions of what were apparently—despite their frontier isolation—a very social people. The gathering of facts is truly impressive, and she does at times tend simply to catalog them, but that rarely. For the most part, she manages to create a highly readable narrative account of life on the Cumberland around 1800, an account that offers something surprising and engaging on every page. Her descriptions of life on the frontier at times make the work a kind of historical Foxfire book. We learn in detail how corn was made into whiskey, how flax was made into linen, how trees were made into barrels , how wells were drilled for salt water—and how all these along with scores of other activities entered into the local economy. We learn how the pioneers educated their children, recorded—sometimes unsuccessfully —their legal ownership of land, and even, in a section that might surprise many champions of free enterprise, how the early governments regulated commerce in ways determined to protect the consumer, governing everything from the size ofpork barrels to the fee a ferry operator could charge for passage—and demanded that said operator must by law keep a tavern as well as a ferry. As extensive and often as fastidious as Arnow's research tends to be, it is not equally strong in all aspects of the social landscape. Her treatment ofreligion is often perfunctory. She does not find the subject itself sufficiently important for...