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264CIVIL WAR HISTORY saw"; and "Mrs. L's meanness is beyond belief"; and, "she has the devils [sic] temper . . . ," opinions that, while harsh, soared on wings of charity when compared to Russell's estimation of his detractors in the American press. Crawford's editing of Russell's private diary is a useful blend ofpreserving the mechanical sense of the original text, as the excerpts quoted above demonstrate , and of sufficient editorial intervention with capitalization and punctuation to allow undisturbed reading. The editorial mistakes are few, although it may be useful to point out that Willard's Hotel, where Russell first stayed upon arriving in the capital, burned and was not "recently restored" and reopened as the Willard Intercontinental, as note 1 on page 22 explains. Today 's Willard dates to 1901; fortunately, preservationists spared it the fate of its razed predecessors, and since 1986 the refurbished hotel has glittered again on Pennsylvania Avenue. William Howard Russell reported several conflicts for the Times: the Crimean War, the Franco Prussian War, and the Zulu War of 1879-80, in all of which he earned deserved fame. Only his failure to cover the American Civil War was to detract from his reputation as a persistent reporter who delved to the core. This offering of his previously unpublished diary helps explain the roots of his American anguish. Bruce S. Greenzwalt University of North Carolina at Asheville The Kentucky Encyclopedia. Editor-in-Chief: John E. Kleber. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992). Pp. 1045. $35.00.) Kentucky always has enjoyed a colorful history, and this was especially true during the sectional crisis and the Civil War. The state's heavy reliance on labor-intensive crops such as tobacco and hemp deepened its social and economic ties and much of its political sympathy with the South; its profitable inclusion in the North's antebellum economic network, based in part on the internal improvements boosted by Henry Clay's "American System," simultaneously tied it to the North. Thus, when civil war began, Kentucky briefly flirted with the impossible: an armed neutrality. Although safely in the Union camp by the fall of 1861, Kentucky remained divided over so many issues that even in victory its path remained unique. Slow to accept the end of slavery and grant civil rights to freedmen, the state counted so many exConfederates in positions of power that many political wags observed tonguein -cheek that Kentucky joined the Confederacy after Appomattox. In many ways, The Kentucky Encyclopedia that describes many of the people , places, and events that interest Middle Period scholars is a model reference guide of its type. Both substantial in size and substantive in scope and in the length of many of its individual entries, the volume was undertaken as a project for the Kentucky Bicentennial Commission. Editor-in-chief John BOOK REVIEWS265 Kleber and his editorial board have selected both entries and authors judiciously and with an eye to explaining Kentucky's own history as well as its place in regional and national affairs. To help students of the Middle Period comprehend the dimensions of Kentucky 's torn loyalties in 1 861, the volume offers many opportunities to illustrate the state's stand on the slavery issue and its role in the growing sectional discord. Melba Porter Hay's fine sketch of Henry Clay is a state-of-the-art product of her years of editorial work with the Henry Clay Papers documentary editing project. Also interesting are entries on Uncle Tom's Cabin, the Kentucky Colonization Society, abolitionist Cassius Marcellus Clay and his antislavery newspaper The Lexington True American, and John J. Crittenden and his compromise. A separate entry on slavery in Kentucky tells much about the special forms it took in the state and the distribution of the slave population that helped determine pro-Union and pro-Confederate sympathies when war came. It is interesting as well to see Kentucky's active part in national social concerns not directly related to the slave question in the antebellum years. The strong ethnic tensions associated with Know-Nothingism are described well in an entry on Bloody Monday, an anti-Irish and antiGerman riot in Louisville in August 1855. A number of...

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