Acknowledgments

 

We are grateful to the many individuals who contributed to our research and writing. First and foremost, we express appreciation to our family members for their love, affectionate encouragement, and generous support. Thank you, Steven Watkins, Andrea's husband, for your enheartening encouragement, and thank you, Andrea and Steven's daughter, Rachel Watkins—your mother and Grandpa are honored to dedicate the book to you. Thank you, Ann Ramage, James's wife and Andrea's mother, for providing child care for Rachel during our research trips, for buoyantly encouraging us, and for generously proofreading the three drafts of the manuscript.

We are greatly honored to have our work included in the Kentucky history series of the Kentucky Historical Society. The Kentucky Historical Society Executive Committee and the editorial staff of the society approved the series with the goals of providing in-depth studies that would attract general readers and scholars. George Morgan Chinn wrote Kentucky: Settlement and Statehood, 1750-1800; Hambleton Tapp and James C. Klotter contributed Kentucky: Decades of Discord, 1865-1900; and James C. Klotter authored Kentucky: Portrait in Paradox, 1900-1950. We are grateful to Kenneth H. Williams for inviting us to write the book, offering us a contract, and recommending that we explore new themes as well as develop the prominent issues developed in Kentucky historiography within the last few decades. We thank the Executive Committee and Darrell Meadows, director of Research and Interpretation, for supporting this volume, and we are doubly honored that our book is the first book co-published with the University Press of Kentucky. We thank Steve Wrinn, the Press's director, Allison Webster, and the staff at the University Press of Kentucky for their cheerful, professional, and dedicated work in producing the book. Nelson L. Dawson, thank you for reading the entire manuscript two times and suggesting valuable editorial changes each time, changes that greatly strengthened the work. More than words can express, we appreciate your careful, professional attention and your scholarly experience and knowledge of Kentucky history and historiography.

Thank you, colleagues on the faculty and staff of the History and Geography Department and department chairs Jeffrey Williams and Paul Tenkotte for your encouragement and provision of an academic environment that inspires creativity and success in meeting deadlines. Thank you, Jan Rachford and Lou Stuntz, for your cheerful assistance every day. We thank Samuel Zachary, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Provost and Academic Vice President Gail Wells, and President James Votruba for your support. We are grateful to the Faculty Benefits Committee of the Faculty Senate for the research grant that funded Andrea's research trips to Lexington and Frankfort. Thank you, Michael A. Flannery, for your friendship and for your insightful and pathbreaking master of arts thesis and published articles that provide a fresh interpretation of Kentucky history in the antebellum period. Your writing and counsel provided most helpful perspectives on medical and scientific history, the level of cultural development, and the impact of the Civil War. Thank you for reading and commenting on the chapters on medicine and science. Steven L. Wright contributed valuable clippings from contemporary newspapers that we would not have secured otherwise. Robert K. Wallace, thank you for calling our attention to Frederick Douglass's challenge to Henry Clay.

We are grateful to the staff members of the libraries where we researched. On the staff of the W. Frank Steely Library, Northern Kentucky University (NKU), we thank Allen Ellis, Phil Yannarella, and Lois Schultz. In Special Collections, we thank Director Lois Hamill and Vicki Cooper; we thank Associate Provost for the Library Arne Almquist for keeping NKU on the cutting edge with databases that provide access to a wealth of primary and secondary sources. Thank you, SourceFinder staff, for responding very promptly to our interlibrary loan requests. Staff members at the Chase College of Law Library rendered valuable assistance. We express gratitude to the staff at the University of Kentucky Library. In Special Collections, William J. Marshall furnished valuable advice on sources and suggested that contemporary newspapers and broadsides would enliven the writing; James D. Birchfield, Claire McCann, and Frank Stanger, thank you for your help. We are grateful to the staff at the Kentucky Historical Library and Special Collections for their valuable help. At the Kenton County Public Library in Covington, we received valuable assistance, and the library's online newspaper index we found very useful. Dave Schroeder contributed helpful advice on northern Kentucky sources.

We feel extremely fortunate with the timing of our project. Indeed, the secondary sources published by scholars of Kentucky history during the last thirty or forty years are outstanding. We were continually impressed with the depth of research, quality of writing, and ability to ask pertinent, meaningful questions. We were so greatly assisted by the three history encyclopedias published by the University Press of Kentucky that we can scarcely imagine completing this study without them. We thank every scholar involved, and especially John E. Kleber, the editor of The Kentucky Encyclopedia and The Louisville Encyclopedia, and Paul A. Tenkotte and James C. Claypool, the editors of The Encyclopedia of Northern Kentucky. Helpful in the same manner was Lowell K. Harrison's Kentucky Governors. We read Thomas D. Clark's A History of Kentucky, and many times we were guided and corrected by opening Harrison and Klotter's A New History of Kentucky, the standard, authoritative survey history of the period and all Kentucky history. The Kentucky Bicentennial Bookshelf Series by the University Press of Kentucky furnished information not available anywhere else. Several monographs, such as Harold D. Tallant's Evil Necessity, pointed us in new directions and contributed significantly to our level of understanding of the people of the time.

We greatly appreciate the work of the editors, the writers, and everyone involved over the years in producing the great number of in-depth articles in the Filson Club History Quarterly, the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, and, in recent years, Ohio Valley History. The Papers of Henry Clay and Robert V. Remini's Henry Clay were helpful. Karl J. Lietzenmayer made a great deal of research on northern Kentucky available by creating and editing Northern Kentucky Heritage. We appreciate the valuable new information in Jerlene Rose, ed., Kentucky's Civil War and other works published by William E. Matthews and Back Home in Kentucky magazine.

We consulted as many published secondary and primary sources as possible and conducted new research with emphasis on broadsides and other printed documents and contemporary newspapers in an attempt to gain fresh perspective and bring events to life and enable the people to speak for themselves. Thank you, Theda Perdue and Christopher Burns, for your friendship and encouragement. Thank you John Ruthven for consulting on the Carolina parakeet. We express appreciation to the following individuals for their assistance in varying ways: Ron Ellis, Floyd Hastings, Eileen Hastings, Andrew Lutes, Carol Medlicott, Debra Meyers, Les Wanner, Ron Chastain, and Ron Wolford Blair.

We acknowledge the generous assistance of everyone who rallied to our requests for illustrations and maps. Dick Gilbreath, thank you for transforming our hand-drawn sketches into professional, dramatic maps that are clear and appealing. Nelson Dawson, Jennifer Duplaga, Patrick A. Lewis, and Tony Curtis, we are grateful to you for searching and promptly finding the images we requested from the Kentucky Historical Society Library. B. J. Gooch, we very much appreciate your work in providing images from the Transylvania University Library; Andrea delighted in working with you once more. Lois Hamill, we feel much obliged to you for going the second mile in researching for images in the Archives and Special Collections of the W. Frank Steely Library at Northern Kentucky University; your helpfulness was encouraging. Anne Ryckbost, thank you very much for your enthusiasm in searching the document collections of Steely Library and other sources for us. Robin Wallace, thank you for your prompt assistance at the Filson Historical Society. Allen Ellis, thank you for your recommendations; Dave Schroeder, we appreciate your valuable work in creating the Northern Kentucky Newspaper Index for the Kenton County Public Library.