Books

At about midday on Friday, April 17, 1885, in the middle of the bloodiest era of internecine feuding that the southeastern Appalachian Mountains have ever known, a young man named Gus Finley was hanged for first degree murder at Prestonburg, Floyd County, Kentucky.

John Sparks has written a historical fiction account of events leading up to the...

In late 1932, with so many Americans either starving or mad with worry at its prospect, a Pentecostal evangelist, “Little” Mary Skaggs, began preaching a revival in western Martin County, Kentucky. Among her converts was Lucinda Mills, matriarch of a large local family, and her son John, who soon claimed to be a prophet. John Mills was said to...

Apologies to the memory of Samuel Beckett for the partial appropriation of his title. This is a collection of short stories and poems, admittedly unconventional, all set in the modern-day Appalachian Mountains, of people trying to survive and find happiness while waiting for God, O.T. (the standard abbreviation for overtime work in the...

Appalachia’s distinctive brand of Christianity has always been something of a puzzle to mainline American congregations. Often treated as pagan and unchurched, native Appalachian sects are labeled as ultraconservative, primitive, and fatalistic, and the actions of minority sub-groups such as “snake handlers” are associated with all worshippers...

In the spring of 2016, when things were getting just about their craziest in American politics, I was approached by the editor of the then-extant “Around Town” family of newspapers in the Big Sandy Valley of eastern Kentucky, to write a weekly column that would appear in all three papers: Around Paintsville, Around Prestonsburg, and Around...

Charles Chilton Moore, 1837-1906, was one of the leading proponents of atheism in the U.S. His “infidel” newspaper, The Bluegrass Blade, published in Lexington, Kentucky, was well-known across the nation, and his legal trials resulted in landmark judicial decisions which set precedents in the areas of freedom of religion and freedom of the press...

The Disciples of Christ, one of the first Christian faiths to have originated in America, was established in 1832 in Lexington, Kentucky, by the union of two groups led by Alexander Campbell and Barton W. Stone. The modern churches resulting from the union are known collectively to religious scholars as part of the Stone-Campbell movement. If...