"'Bloody Breathitt': Power and Violence in the mountain South"

Abstract

Dissertation under the direction of Professor David L. Carlton This project deals with political violence involving white southerners in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the circumstances through which the political significance of said violence was obscured or erased in the public memory. For decades after the American Civil War, Breathitt County, Kentucky seemed to be an unusually violent place. During the war it was the battlefield for a series of guerilla skirmishes and, after the war was officially over, the same sort of political and racial discord seen in other areas of the Reconstruction-era South was rampant there as well. As violence continued there after it had subsided elsewhere, Breathitt County’s historical similarities to the rest of the South were confounded, often intentionally, by the term “feud†and its apolitical connotations of kinship and antiquity. The varieties of violence used there, and the political situations that caused them, reveal similarities to larger trends in American and World history. While “feud†suggested a peculiar sui generis occurrence, evidence suggests that Breathitt County’s violent history reflected problems also experienced in the outside world.