The Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections, and provides specialized services for adaptive reading and information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities.

To visit the Internet Archive: Click Here.

The Internet Archives' collection of online texts may be its most useful aspect for genealogical and general historical purposes.

To visit: Click Here.

To go directly to the American libraries sub-collection: Click Here.

Online Searchable Death Indexes & Records

A Genealogy Guide

This website is a directory of links to websites with online death indexes, listed by state and county. Included are death records, death certificate indexes, death notices & registers, obituaries, probate indexes, and cemetery & burial records. You can also find information here about searching the Social Security Death Index online.

To access: Click Here.

US-Places.com

US-Places.com provides a wealth of information about the places and people of each state and county in the United States. Find out about population characteristics, land area statistics, and view state to state and county by county comparisons.

To access: Click Here.

Night Comes to the Cumberlands

By Harry M. Caudill

One of the most eloquent voices of the southern mountains was the Whitesburg lawyer, legislator and author Harry M. Caudill, who was born in Letcher County in 1922 and died in 1990. Late in his life he taught history at the University of Kentucky. His great contribution to Kentucky letters, however, is his articles and books depicting the robbing and raping of the mountain riches by wealthy coal and timber companies and the robber barons who led them. One of the most influential in American reform writing is Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area (1963), which focused the nation's attention on the plight of the dispossessed poor in one of the nation's richest regions. After Caudill's death, the Courier-Journal referred to the book in these words: "Once in a while a book appears that so captures the minds of readers that it alters history and shapes how a people are viewed."

(Quoted from: The Kentucky anthology: two hundred years of writing in the Bluegrass State by Wade H. Hall.)

Among other things, this book led to the creation of the Application Regional Commission. It is "must reading" for anyone interested Southern Appalachia in general and Kentucky's Cumberland Plateau in particular.

For more on the Appalachian Regional Commission: Click Here.

For more on Harry Caudill: Click Here and Click Here.

Pine Mountain

Pine Mountain represents one of the last great contiguous stretches of unfragmented forest in Kentucky. While other parts of the region have been developed, strip-mined or heavily logged, Pine Mountain remains relatively untouched. Positioned at the western edge of the Appalachian Mountains, the mountain offers commanding views of Virginia, Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee. If ever there was a hope of preserving an ecological legacy for future generations of Kentuckians, this is it. The mountain has remained a refuge in the face of increasing human intrusion, mainly because it is a rugged, nearly roadless mountain that is guarded by jutting sandstone cliffs, tangled rhododendron thickets and large, pre-historic land slides laden with car-sized boulders. Even when deer and turkey were driven out of most of the region, Pine Mountain remained a refuge for wildlife native to the area. Today the mountain serves as the travel corridor for black bear re-entering the state from Virginia and Tennessee. It provides habitat for the newly restored elk, and is the home of many Kentucky species that are restricted to Pine Mountain (i.e. rose pogonia, frostweed and the largest known population of yellow wild indigo in the Commonwealth). Breached by only six roads in 110 miles, the mountain represents a significant unprotected wilderness area.

To learn more about Pine Mountain and the Pine Mountain Trail Conference which is in the process of building hiking trail along the length of Pine Mountain from the Breaks Interstate Park to Cumberland Gap National Historical Park: Click Here.

The Battles of Whitesburg

At the beginning of the War Between the States the small community was comprised of about 350 citizens. Early in the war both Union and Confederate officials recognized the strategic importance of Whitesburg as a base camp for operations. This was due to it being the closest community to several gaps and roads through the steep mountain ranges of the Appalachian Mountains known locally as the Pine Mountain range. Due to the steepness of the terrain, the gaps and roads were the easiest and sometimes the only accessible way of getting troops and supplies between Kentucky and Virginia. The road through Pound Gap (sometimes referred to as Sounding Gap, the Trace as well as Fincastle Trail) was the best traveled of these natural routes in and out of the hills of Kentucky. This gap was approximately 12 miles north east of Whitesburg and at its widest point it was said to be only approximately fourteen feet wide. The largest battle fought in Letcher County took place in this gap. The gap was defended by Confederate troops under the command of General Humphrey Marshall and were defeated by Union troops under the command of future President Colonel James Garfield. Both of these leaders would stay in Whitesburg on several occasions.

To read about the two Battles of Whitesburg: Click Here.

"Of Portuguese Origin"

"Of Portuguese Origin": Litigating Identity and Citizenship
Among the "Little Races" in Nineteenth-Century America

Law and History Review, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Fall 2007)

By Ariela Gross

ABSTRACT The history of race in the nineteenth-century United States is often told as a story of black and white in the South, and white and Indian in the West, with little attention to the intersection between black and Indian. This article explores the history of nineteenth-century America's "little races"—racially ambiguous communities of African, Indian, and European origin up and down the eastern seaboard. These communities came under increasing pressure in the years leading up to the Civil War and in its aftermath to fall on one side or the other of a black-white color line. Drawing on trial records of cases litigating the racial identity of the Melungeons of Tennessee, the Croatans/Lumbee of North Carolina, and the Narragansett of Rhode Island, this article looks at the differing paths these three groups took in the face of Jim Crow: the Melungeons claiming whiteness; the Croatans/Lumbee asserting Indian identity and rejecting association with blacks; the Narragansett asserting Indian identity without rejecting their African origins. Members of these communities found that they could achieve full citizenship in the U.S. polity only to the extent that they abandoned their self-governance and distanced themselves from people of African descent.

Highly recommended: This paper focuses on Melungeons, with an extensive discussion of several important court cases involving Melungeon racial and ethnic identity.

To read the paper in its entirety: Click Here.

See also:

• The Secret History of Race in the United States
• Melungeon Court Cases

Note: The two persistent claims by the Melungeons themselves as to their origins were Indian and Portuguese, with Portuguese usually being asserted when going to court to claim their constitutional rights in the time of de jure racism.