An Irreverent History of Kentucky
Blood, Bourbon, and Things That Fell from the Sky
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to wishlist failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Get 30 days of Standard free
An Irreverent History of Kentucky
Buy Now for £6.39
-
Narrated by:
-
A. Joshua Leonard
Summary
Kentucky has been explained to death. It has been flattened into a punchline, romanticized into a symbol, and studied into abstraction. None of it has worked, because none of it has taken the place seriously on its own terms.
This book does.
From prehistoric cave systems and Indigenous knowledge to Civil War neutrality that somehow produced two simultaneous governments, from a documented rain of meat in 1876 to the bourbon industry's carefully curated erasure of the labor that built it, Kentucky emerges here not as a curiosity or a cautionary tale but as a case study in how value moves in one direction and consequence moves in another. In Kentucky, that pattern is old enough and specific enough to be read clearly.
Witty, rigorous, and consistently surprising, this is the history of a place that learned early that being underestimated was safer than being understood, and that has been paying for that lesson ever since.