THE CIVIL WAR AND READJUSTMENT IN KENTUCKY

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1926.. [xii],468pp., including maps. Original red cloth, stamped in gilt and blind. Corners and spine ends rubbed. Internally clean. Very good in original dust jacket (chipped and torn, upper third of backstrip missing). E. Merton Coulter was a professor of history at the University of Georgia, a founding member of the Southern Historical Association, and editor of the Georgia Historical Quarterly. In the present work he traces the history of this southern border state from its initial position of neutrality, through the war and Kentuckians' mounting list of grievances against the Union, to its ultimate opposition to Reconstruction. Seeking an explanation as to why "Kentucky has pursued a more remarkable and enigmatical course than any of her sisters," Coulter argues that it was because of Kentucky's "individuality," concluding that "Kentuckians were simply different. They got into the war in their own way, fought it in their own way, and came out of it in their own way."

Coulter has come to be associated with the Dunning School of historiography and what historians generally characterize as its racist defense of Southern secession and opposition to Reconstruction, though Coulter himself studied at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and not at Columbia with William A. Dunning. In his Black Reconstruction in America, W.E.B. Du Bois listed the book under the heading "Standard - Anti-Negro," explaining that "These authors believe the Negro to be sub-human and congenitally unfitted for citizenship and the suffrage." But despite being "seriously flawed and obviously dated," Coulter's study of the Civil War and Reconstruction in Kentucky is still "one of the most durable works in the field," writes historian John David Smith.

"A good account of the history and character of this key border state; embraces all facets of life there." - Nevins. NEVINS II, p.147. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (New York. 1935), p.731. John David Smith, "E. Merton Coulter, the 'Dunning School,' and The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky" in Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Vol. 86, no. 1 (Winter 1988), pp.52-69.