On Rising Ground provides a richly-researched account of a Confederate foot soldier drawn from the thirty surviving letters he wrote to his wife Martha.
Non-Fiction
In My Old Kentucky Home, Emily Bingham explores the long, strange journey of what has come to be seen by some as an American anthem, an integral part of our folklore, culture, customs, foundation, a living symbol of a “happy past.” But “My Old Kentucky Home” was never just a song. It was always a […]
With history and anecdotes centering around books such as Thoreau’s Journal, Tagore’s Gitanjali, Martin Buber’s Hasidic Tales, and Tolstoy’s Twenty-three Tales, he demonstrates how and why there is magic and enchantment that takes place between people and books.
A collection of empowering stories and captivating photos, My Beautiful Black Hair celebrates an aspect of Black femininity—natural hair—and embraces it as a central part of Black womanhood. My Beautiful Black Hair is a book about Black women embracing their natural hair. One hundred and one Black women share their stories of learning to love […]
Murder Ballads Old and New is a graveyard stroll that's equal parts musicological, psychosocial, and genealogical, excavating facts and exploring stories that reveal larger contexts while mapping the lineages of songs and themes, forebears, and ancestors.
His latest book, Love for the Land draws on in-depth interviews and the writings of Wendell Berry to explore why some small and midsized farmers continue to care for their land and calls upon everyone to learn from these farmers and cultivate a better future for food and farming.
Between 1820 and 1913, approximately 16,000 black people left the United States to start new lives in Liberia, Africa, in what was at the time the largest out-migration in US history. When Tolbert Major, a former Kentucky slave and single father, was offered his own chance for freedom, he accepted. He, several family members, and […]
In 130 ink-and-watercolor drawings, the story of one year on a family farm in Kentucky unfolds in captured moments of daily life: Donahue’s husband chopping wood, a cow sniffing her head, her daughter tending to goats after a hard day at school.
When Triple Crown winner Seattle Slew retired from racing in 1978 to stand at stud at Spendthrift Farm, no one could be certain he would be a successful sire. But just four years later, his dark bay daughter Landaluce won the Hollywood Lassie Stakes by twenty-one lengths—a margin of victory that remains the largest ever […]
In this landmark biography, winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award, Eig gives us an MLK for our times: a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, and a committed radical who led one of history’s greatest movements, and whose demands for racial and economic justice […]
Kentucky's Lost Bourbon Distilleries recounts a part of the rich history of the Commonwealth’s world-renowned bourbon industry and the hundreds of distilleries that closed because of Prohibition or decades afterwards with only old photographs left to tell this story of dedicated craftsmanship.
Kentucky’s first senator, John Brown, is almost unknown in the nation and in Kentucky. He was a son of colonial Virginia and a father of Kentucky statehood, but historians have often minimized his contribution, slurred him as a “Spanish conspirator,” or deliberately excluded him from the historiography. He was the only Kentuckian active in national […]