@article{friend_2022, title={My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song}, volume={120}, ISSN={["2161-0355"]}, DOI={10.1353/khs.2022.0036}, abstractNote={Reviewed by: My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song by Emily Bingham Craig Thompson Friend (bio) My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song. By Emily Bingham. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2022. Pp. xx, 329. $30.00 cloth; $14.99 ebook) If the singing of “My Old Kentucky Home” at the Kentucky Derby or a University of Kentucky football game or other public events has ever brought goosebumps or a tear to your eye, read this book. It is a book about how our ancestors crafted and used historical memory, whether in the form of a song, a lost cause, a historic site, or an absolute belief in American progress that allows us to continue to sing a song about enslavement because such horrors are in the past. It is also a book about reckoning as “an act of hope,” as Emily Bingham concludes in her exceptional study of one of the most iconic songs in United States history (p. 229). We live in an age of reckoning, wrestling with legacies of colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, and probably most importantly, our ancestors’ inability (or refusal) to acknowledge and solve the inequalities those legacies created in a nation founded on the premise of equality. We have witnessed much of this reckoning in public ways: the dismantling of Confederate monuments, the removal of enslavers’ statues and names from federal institutions, and the publication of The 1619 Project (2019). Not just the public, but historians, too, have questioned how history-making, as an endeavor, contributed to myths that caused, and continue to cause, more harm than good. In Creating a Confederate Kentucky (2010), Anne Marshall visited the monument mania that overtook Kentuckians in the late nineteenth century as they crafted a memory of the Civil War that did not fit their realities, making Kentucky “southern” in the process. Now, we have Bingham’s study of “My Old Kentucky Home”—a song written to make a quick dime through white performers in [End Page 197] blackface as they mocked Black Americans and altered to appeal to more genteel audiences so that they would buy the sheet music. It was employed to create nostalgia around a lost cause that few Kentuckians had experienced, was sung by Black performers who knew success relied on concession, became part of a canon of “exotic” southern fare with the rise of Hollywood movies, found itself attached to a historic site that had no connection to it or its author, and became so sentimentalized that the commonwealth uncritically adopted it as its state song. Her study is so thorough that it is difficult to imagine what Bingham might have overlooked in the research, and her writing is simultaneously inspiring and provocative. As a Kentuckian, Bingham lived with and relished the sentimentality of “My Old Kentucky Home.” This book is more than a history of the song, however. It is a memoir of her journey toward enlightenment about the song, and why, although it still holds a place in her memories, it can no longer hold a place in her heart. Bingham draws her own ancestors—people who enslaved others, who perpetuated racial segregation and oppression, who bought into the mythology of the Old Kentucky home—into the story, and with good reason. The history of a song is more than a dispassionate objective narrative, it is the story of how each person hears and remembers that song. Although some readers may bristle at the myth-busting, Bingham offers readers the opportunity to weigh for themselves the harsh realities of history and the sentimental comforts of a fabricated past. Ultimately, that is Bingham’s purpose, to empower Kentuckians, particularly Black Kentuckians, to reconsider “My Old Kentucky Home” in their history and mythology. “I don’t believe it can be wrong to love a song,” she contemplates, “but I do believe we commit wrongs when we do not understand what we claim to love” (p. 229). [End Page 198] Craig Thompson Friend CRAIG THOMPSON FRIEND teaches history and public history at North Carolina State University. He is co-author of The New History of Kentucky, 2d. ed. (2018) and...}, number={2}, journal={REGISTER OF THE KENTUCKY HISTORICAL SOCIETY}, author={Friend, Craig Thompson}, year={2022}, pages={197–198} }
 @book{friend_glover_2020, place={Baton Rouge, LA}, title={Reinterpreting Southern histories : essays in historiography}, publisher={Louisiana State University Press}, year={2020} }
 @article{friend_2019, title={Contesting slave masculinity in the American South}, volume={40}, ISSN={["1743-9523"]}, DOI={10.1080/0144039X.2019.1679506}, abstractNote={Scholarship on enslaved masculinity has seen a resurgence as of late. Sergio A. Lussana's intriguing My Brother Slaves: Friendship, Masculinity, and Resistance in the American South arrived in 2016...}, number={4}, journal={SLAVERY & ABOLITION}, author={Friend, Craig Thompson}, year={2019}, month={Oct}, pages={787–789} }
 @article{friend_2017, title={The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery}, volume={7}, ISSN={["2159-9807"]}, DOI={10.1353/cwe.2017.0100}, abstractNote={Reviewed by: The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery by Micki McElya Craig Thompson Friend (bio) The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery. By Micki McElya. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016. Pp. 416. Cloth, $29.95.) Over 4 million people annually visit Arlington National Cemetery, clicking photographs of John F. Kennedy's gravesite, the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and the National Mall from the heights at Arlington House. In the cemetery gift shop, they can purchase its histories. Most are flashy coffee-table books that inspire patriotic sentiment by relating the narratives of the military dead who came to lie in the cemetery's pristinely ordered rows of graves. Yet Arlington National Cemetery's history, symbolism, and meaning is far deeper and more nuanced than any of the gift-shop books relate. Today, it is America's most hallowed grounds, but it began as a plantation sanctified by the sweat, tears, and blood of slaves and then by the sacrifices of Union soldiers willing to die to destroy such monuments to American slavery. Meticulously researched and engagingly written, Micki McElya's The Politics of Mourning considers the many layers of Arlington's narrative, revealing how the cemetery is not only a place of remembrance but one of erasure and repurposing as well. At the heart of her analysis is the [End Page 682] incongruence between the memory of Arlington—the purposeful creation of a narrative that encapsulates the breadth of American history in order to promote national pride—and the history of Arlington—a broader and more inclusive story that, if given the respect deserved, provides "an opportunity to expand the contours of the honorable and brave, not diminish them … an opportunity to forge a vision of national belonging and identification that is dedicated to remembering through reckoning, rather than forgetting" (11). The public began visiting Arlington in the 1850s, when it was one of Robert E. Lee's plantations (actually belonging to his wife, Mary Custis) and home to hundreds of slaves. In many ways, postbellum Lost Cause history so powerfully transformed the narrative of those late antebellum years with myths of the faithful slave and benevolent paternalism that interpretation at Arlington House today continues to echo those themes. McElya masterfully disabuses us of accepting those notions, however, uncovering Lee's brutal use of his slaves and punishment of runaways. The irony, then, is that Arlington House today is a memorial to Lee when it actually belonged to Mary and was the permanent home for hundreds of African Americans. Even before Arlington's appropriation as a cemetery, blacks and white women were erased from the landscape. The thrust of the book is that, as America's most sacred space, Arlington plays a central role in defining who is honorable in life and in death. The early erasure of blacks and white women, then, portended poorly for their inclusion among the honorable. The story of how the plantation became a cemetery, much of which will be familiar to scholars of the era, populates the landscape with honorable burials, pausing on occasion to note the segregation of graves for U.S. Colored Troops (officially catalogued as "contraband") alongside those for slaves and freedpeople, efforts to extricate Confederate remains from graves of unknown soldiers, and rules against the burial of wives with their husbands. Even as Montgomery Meigs worked to expand the cemetery's symbolic purpose by relocating into Arlington the remains of soldiers from earlier wars, the continued exclusion of others narrowed the definition of honor. McElya emphasizes this point by noting efforts to remove Freedman's Village, which had arisen at Arlington during the war, displacing people who viewed the landscape as their homes. The history of Arlington is not just about who was or was not interred there. McElya makes a convincing argument that the politics of mourning are important to understanding Reconstruction-era policy toward freed-people's communities, the passion of Radical Republicanism, the rising role of tourism at the turn of the twentieth century, and the monument campaigns of early twentieth-century America that culminated in sectional [End Page 683...}, number={4}, journal={JOURNAL OF THE CIVIL WAR ERA}, author={Friend, Carl Thompson}, year={2017}, month={Dec}, pages={682–684} }
 @article{friend_glover_2015, title={Introduction: Death and the American South}, DOI={10.1017/cbo9781316018880.001}, journal={Death and the american south}, author={Friend, C. T. and Glover, L.}, year={2015}, pages={1–14} }
 @article{friend_2015, title={Mutilated bodies, living specters: Scalpings and beheadings in the early South}, DOI={10.1017/cbo9781316018880.002}, journal={Death and the american south}, author={Friend, C. T.}, year={2015}, pages={15–35} }
 @article{friend_2015, title={Nonhelema Hokolesqua, Jemima Boone Callaway, and Matilda Lewis Threlkeld (1718-1786; 1762-1829; 1799-c. 1885) searching for Kentucky's female frontier}, journal={Kentucky women: their lives and times}, author={Friend, C. T.}, year={2015}, pages={8–32} }
 @book{friend_jabour_2010, title={Family values in the old South}, ISBN={9780813034188}, publisher={Gainesville: University of Florida}, year={2010} }
 @article{friend_2007, title={The making of the American South: A short history, 1500-1877.}, volume={73}, ISSN={["0022-4642"]}, DOI={10.2307/27649488}, abstractNote={Acknowledgements. . Map: The United States in 1860. Prologue. Part I: Before Southern History. 1. Before the South. 2. Colonials Become Americans. 3. Southern Power in the New Nation. . Part II: Making the Old South. 4. An American Slave Society. 5. The Politics of Slavery and the Road to Secession. 6. Civil Wars. 7. The Reconstruction of the South and the Construction of Southern History. Notes. Bibliographical Note. Index}, number={3}, journal={JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY}, author={Friend, Craig Thompson}, year={2007}, month={Aug}, pages={671–672} }
 @book{friend_2005, title={Along the Maysville Road the early American republic in the trans-Appalachian West}, publisher={Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press}, author={Friend, C.T.}, year={2005} }
 @article{morris_2000, title={The buzzel about Kentuck: Settling the Promised Land}, volume={66}, ISSN={["0022-4642"]}, DOI={10.2307/2587674}, number={2}, journal={JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY}, author={Morris, C}, year={2000}, month={May}, pages={393–395} }