Topics in Kentucky History

A biography of the Kentucky women's rights activist and progressive reformer, featuring personal interviews and recently discovered correspondence. Preeminent Kentucky reformer and women's rights advocate Madeline McDowell Breckinridge (1872-1920) was at the forefront of social change, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A descendant of Henry Clay and the daughter of two of Kentucky's most prominent families, Breckinridge had a remarkably varied activist career that included roles in the promotion of public health, education, women's rights, and charity. Founder of the Lexington Civic League and Associated Charities, Breckinridge successfully lobbied to create parks and playgrounds and to establish a juvenile court system in Kentucky. She also became president of the Kentucky Equal Rights Association, served as vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and even campaigned across the country for the League of Nations. In the first biography of Breckinridge since 1921, Melba Porter Hay draws on newly discovered correspondence and rich personal interviews with her female associates to illuminate the fascinating life of this important Kentucky activist. Deftly balancing Breckinridge's public reform efforts with her private concerns, Hay tells the story of Madeline's marriage to Desha Breckinridge, editor of the Lexington Herald, and how she used the match to her advantage by promoting social causes in the newspaper. Hay also chronicles Breckinridge's ordeals with tuberculosis and amputation, and emotionally trying episodes of family betrayal and sex scandals. Hay describes how Breckinridge's physical struggles and personal losses transformed her from a privileged socialite into a selfless advocate for the disadvantaged. Later as vice president of the National American Women Suffrage Association, Breckinridge lobbied for Kentucky's ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote in 1920. While devoting much of her life to the woman suffrage movement on the local and national levels, she also supported the anti-tuberculosis movement, social programs for the poor, compulsory school attendance, and laws regulating child labor. In bringing to life this extraordinary reformer, Hay shows how Breckinridge championed Kentucky's social development during the Progressive Era.

From five thousand children marching in a parade, singing, "Johnnie get your hoe...Mary dig your row," to communities banding together to observe Meatless Tuesdays and Wheatless Wednesdays, Kentuckians were loyal supporters of their country during the First World War. Kentucky had one of the lowest rates of draft dodging in the nation, and the state increased its coal production by 50-percent, during the war years. Overwhelmingly, the people of the Commonwealth set aside partisan interests and worked together to help the nation achieve victory in Europe. David J. Bettez provides the first comprehensive analysis of the impact of the Great War on Bluegrass society, politics, economy, and culture, contextualizing the state's involvement within the national experience. His exhaustively researched study examines the Kentucky Council of Defense, which sponsored local war-effort activities-military mobilization and preparation, opposition and dissent, and the role of religion and higher education in shaping the state's response to the war. It also describes the efforts of Kentuckians who served abroad in military and civilian capacities, and postwar memorialization of their contributions. Kentucky and the Great War explores the impact of the conflict on women's suffrage, child labor, and African American life. In particular, Bettez investigates how black citizens were, urged to support a war to make the world "safe for democracy" even as their civil rights and freedoms were violated in the Jim Crow South. This engaging and timely social history offers new perspectives on an overlooked aspect of World War I.

The life and work of a sculptor who pushed both aesthetic and social boundaries at the turn of the twentieth-century is, explored in this in-depth study. Working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Louisville-born sculptor Enid Yandell developed a distinctly physical and masculine style that challenged the gender norms of artistic practice. An award-winning sculptor with numerous commissions, she was also an activist for women's suffrage and other political movements. This study examines Yandell's evolution from a young, Southern dilettante into an internationally acclaimed artist and public figure. Yandell found early success as one of a select group of female sculptors at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. She was then, commissioned to create a twenty-five foot figure of Pallas Athena for Nashville's Centennial Exposition in 1897. Yandell's command of classical subject matter was, matched by her abilities with large-scale, figurative works such as the Daniel Boone statue in Cherokee Park, Louisville. Part of the art worlds of New York and Paris, Yandell associated with luminary sculptors like Frederick MacMonnies and Auguste Rodin. She became one of the first female members of the National Sculpture Society in 1898. This authoritative study explores the many ways in which Yandell was a pioneer.

Belle Brezing made a major career move when she stepped off the streets of Lexington, Kentucky, and into Jennie Hill's bawdy house, an upscale brothel run out of a former residence of Mary Todd Lincoln. At nineteen, Brezing was already infamous as a youth steeped in death, sex, drugs, and scandal. But it was in Miss Hill's "respectable" establishment that she began to acquire the skills, manners, and business contacts that allowed her to ascend to power and influence as an internationally known madam. In this revealing book, Maryjean Wall offers a tantalizing true story of vice and power in the Gilded Age South, as told through the life and times of the notorious Miss Belle. After years on the streets and working for Hill, Belle Brezing borrowed enough money to set up her own establishment, her wealth and fame growing alongside the booming popularity of horse racing. Soon, her houses were known internationally, and powerful patrons from the industrial cities of the Northeast courted her in the lavish parlors of her gilt-and-mirror mansion. Secrecy was a moral code in the sequestered demimonde of prostitution in Victorian America, so little has been written about the Southern madam credited with inspiring the character Belle Watling in Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. Following Brezing from her birth amid the ruins of the Civil War to the height of her scarlet fame and beyond, Wall uses her story to explore a wider world of sex, business, politics, and power. The result is a scintillating tale that is as enthralling as any fiction.