One of the first great reference tools on the Commonwealth, this WPA Guide is an important, vital part of our heritage. While it includes brief essays describing Kentucky's history, folklore, education, industry, geology, ethnic mix and other topics, the most remarkable feature is the driving tours that are as accurate today as they were more than half a century ago. Careful annotations give directions, point out historical and tourist sites, describe the country side, and even provide mileage for the drives.

The figure of an old man poling a skiff toward shore against the evening light engaged Susan Brait to learn about Chesapeake Bay, and it is that image which opens this her book on the oystermen of the Bay and the sapping of their traditional life, and even the bounty of the Bay itself, by the demands of American society.With directness and poetic economy Brait takes the reader into the life of the Bay and into the complex relationships that affect oysters and those who make their living from them. Her account weaves easily from the daily work of oystermen to the natural forces that have shaped the Bay, from the experimental culture of oysters by marine biologists to the plans of businessmen who expect to grow and harvest the mollusks on privately owned reefs, from efforts to legislate control of the Bay and its resources to the upper reaches of the Susquehanna River where increasing pollution of the Bay originates from agricultural practices of the Amish and other farmers. These and other disparate elements are gracefully woven into a seamless web that represents the complex wholeness of the Bay itself.Chesapeake Gold is a sensitive portrayal of people and their place, but it is also more. The oystermen and their efforts to maintain their traditional life become a figure for our society's struggle to find an ethic that will serve both man and the natural world that man is apart from and a part of.

Sulky races at the Mercer County Fair, church suppers, sorghum making, shooting marbles in the school yard, housing tobacco, loafing at the courthouse -- here are 129 beautifully reproduced images of who we were as Kentuckians not so long ago -- during the Depression and the early years of World War II.This collection is part of the remarkable series of photos shot for the Farm Security Administration -- more than 125,000 photographs taken over a period of nine years by some of the best American photographers of the time, including Ben Shahn, Marion Post Wolcott, Russell Lee, John Vachon, and Arthur Rothstein.To reintroduce us to that important slice of our history, Beverly Brannan and David Horvath have selected a rich sampling from among several thousand photos taken in Kentucky for the FSA. They have added an extra dimension to the images by including in their commentary excerpts from the photographers' own correspondence and field notes.Along with a lively introduction by the well-known Kentucky poet Jim Wayne Miller, the text of A Kentucky Album helps us see these photographs as art, as social history, and as an unforgettable composite of the amazing diversity of culture, history, and environment that have made Kentucky unique.

Shantyboat is the story of a leisurely journey down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans. For most people such a journey is the stuff that dreams are made of, but for Harlan and Anna Hubbard it became a cherished reality. In the fall of 1944 they built a houseboat, small but neatly accommodated to their needs, on the bank of the Ohio near Cincinnati, and in it after a pause of two years they set out to drift down the river. In their small craft, the Hubbards became one with the flow of the river and its changing weathers. An artist by profession, Harlan Hubbard records with graceful ease the many facets of their life on the river-the panorama of fields and woods, summer gardening, foraging expeditions for nuts and berries, dangers from storms and treacherous currents, the quiet solitude of the mists of early morning. Their life is sustained by the provender of bank and stream, useful things made and found, and mutual aid and wisdom from people met along the journey. It is a life marked by simplicity and independence, strenuous at times, but joyous, with leisure for painting and music, for observation and contemplation.

A personalized travelogue, My World chronicles the inspiring story of a poor Kentucky boy who learned how to turn the rough grist of his life into the fine art of literature.Jesse Stuart's life centered on W-Hollow, Greenup County, Kentucky, and extended to the far corners of the world. As a writer, teacher, and lecturer, he traveled to all but one of the United States and to ninety countries on six continents. As the core of Stuart's world, W-Hollow was the place of his birth and his first reaching out -- to the brown earth and the green shoots growing out of it, to the insects and animals that inhabited its wooded slopes, to the blue sky and the birds that flashed across it. From W-Hollow he went out first to Greenup High School, then to Lincoln Memorial University, then to all of Kentucky, and finally to the world.In My World, we see Stuart's expanding universe through his eyes. Through the telescoping essays, Stuart slowly extends his vision to encompass more of the world and humanity. He is conscious of the social and geographical forces that shaped and defined his life. He is also very aware of the forces that draw him home again. He saw his beloved Kentucky as many states in one. Each region -- from the east Kentucky mountains to the Jackson Purchase -- was a unique kingdom. Stuart brings Kentucky's varied scenery, its people, and their distinctive dialects and social customs to life for his readers.