Days of Darkness. The Feuds of Eastern Kentucky by John Ed Pearce (review)

176 Canadian Review of American Studies evangelical tradition feature prominently. But there is little discussion of contrasting models of the American religious experience. The question of the commercialization of evangelical religion is ignored. The view that religion has receded from public life and become highly private and syncrettc is overlooked. Finally, the possibility that the United States is a "Post-Christian" society-albeit in a very different way than in Britain-is not considered. Instead the volume accepts a model of evangelicalism in America which suggests ongoing Christianization. David B. Marshall University of Calgary John Ed Pearce. Days of Darkness. The Feuds of &stern Kentucky. Lexington : University Press of Kentucky, 1994. Pp. 227 and illustrations. From roughly the 1880s until the U.S. entry into World War I, Eastern Kentucky became a country of the mind. Its people seemed a byword for savagery, its culture could be explained only as a timewarp, its social institutions were dismissed as retrograde. The Kentucky hills flourished as the cultural capital of that most picturesquely backward of regions, the Southern mountains that we now term Appalachia. This book is about the chief cause of that reinvention of Kentucky, the blood feud. Henry Shapiro's Appalachia on Our Mind. The Southenz Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), describes forcefully the cultural construction of the region and its people. The incorporation of the timber and minerals of Appalachia within the global economy subjected the territory to more than intense dislocation and disruption. The process of capitalization required imaginative cornrnodification as well, a process dovetailing with the country's literary agenda. Richard Brodhead's Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) shows how this period saw the metropolitan, masculinist institutions of Boston and New York exerting control over literary reputation and ranking. Writers marginalized for reasons of geography, social class, and gender discovered a means of gaining admission to the company of their betters. They could package and exploit as exotic the folkways of regions within the Book Reutews 177 United States. For popular fiction, this resulted in the triumph of the Western . The "local colour" school of serious fiction saw the exploitation of rustic Yankees, desperate Prairie sod-busters, and Southern Highlanders, among others. Rebecca Harding Davis pumped vitality into a declining career by tapping the potential of the highlands where she holidayed, Mary Noailles Murfree ("Charles Egbert Craddock") flourished by writing up the plain folk whom she knew as the lady in the Big House. This opened a process that would culminate in the popular success of John Fox, Jr., whose The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (New York: Scribner's, [1903] 1931) sold a million copies quicker than any American novel had done before. However remote all this bookchat may seem from the grim brutalities narrated in Days of Darkness, cultural rather than political history best explains why John Ed Pearce and his publishers find feuding an interesting subject. The widespread social disruptions in Eastern Kentucky, in which warring factions shot their neighbouring foes over decades in defiance of sheriff and militia soldier alike, caught the attention of the metropolitan press a century ago. They remain of interest today. In their time they confirmed a set of assumptions about the nature of their exotic venue; some of that relegation of Appalachia to the confines of a colourful dream world remains still. Otis K. Rice published his monograph on The Hatfields and the McCoys (Lexington : University Press of Kentucky, 1978) as part of a Kentucky bicentennial series; would the history of any other state in the Union properly include so lengthy a discussion of that sort of material? "Feudin', a-fightin', and a-fussin', 11 to recall a pop number of the Forties, appeared so aberrant that it could only be explained to metropolitan audiences in ahistoncal terms. This is far from the actual case. Rather than a culture whose thin topsoil of effective public institutions had been rooted up and then blown away by rapid modernization, Appalachia became a Brigadoon in the contemporary media. History gave way to sci-fi. Mountaineers were "our...