Book Notes

Integrated: The Lincoln Institute, Basketball, and a Vanished Tradition. By James W. Miller. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2017. Pp. 288. $29.95 cloth; $29.95 ebook)

A somber note often found by historians of the Civil Rights and integration years is that after the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, cherished schooling institutions within African American society were outlawed just as well as whites-only schools. James Miller has found one interesting example of this bittersweet truth in the case of Lincoln Institute, where the cloud of uncertainty and debate over how quickly Kentucky schools would integrate coincided with some of Lincoln's best years of high school basketball. Drawing from an impressive array of the state's newspapers and a host of oral history interviews, Miller offers a compelling local study of integration, and his accounts of contests in the state tournament make the book lively enough for any reader interested in Kentucky education and high school basketball.

My Curious and Jocular Heroes: Tales and Tale-Spinners from Appalachia. By Loyal Jones. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017. Pp. vii, 246. $95.00 cloth; $25.00 paper)

Loyal Jones' contributions to Appalachian studies are well known, both in his own writing and his many years of service at Berea College and Hindman Settlement School. Here he gives four brief and highly amusing biographies of Appalachian folklorists who preceded and inspired him, including Bascom Lamar Lunsford, the legendary fiddle performer and folksong preservationist, and Cratis B. Williams, often called the father of Appalachian studies. After each biography Jones gives a sampling of his subjects' stories, folksong lyrics, notated music, and humor. It's hardly surprising that music is a unifying theme across each of the sections, as the rich field of Appalachian folklore usually comes into contact with the region's celebrated traditions of song and balladry. Humor is the more unique thread here, as each subject contributes jokes and hilarious (though surprisingly bawdy) stories, which Jones uses to illustrate the genial and often "curious" nature of his heroes.

Dangerous Waters: A Photo Essay on the Tennessee Valley Authority. By Micah Cash. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2017 Pp. xi, 130. $39.95 cloth)

"Nothing about the agency's history is simple" (p. 3). So Micah Cash contends at the beginning of Dangerous Waters, echoing a realization that any historian interested in the Tennessee Valley Authority quickly finds. History, geography, and stunning photography blend very well here, as Cash conveys his meditation on how TVA dams, rivers, and recreation areas symbolize the greater American ideas of public works and spaces. Recreation and tourism are the more current elements in this essay. The herculean effort to change the landscape and provide power to millions of rural residents is the more well-known aspect of the TVA, but Cash also dwells on TVA lakes and dams as present-day parks and travel destinations. The many dams and green landscapes make for beautiful pictures (as the agency architects intended), but reflecting on which spaces the public are encouraged to visit or prohibited from entering reveals the complicated social history of this massive project.

The Ohio: The Historic River in Vintage Postcard Art, 1900–1960. By John A. Jakle and Dannel McCollum. (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2017. Pp. x, 172. $24.95 paper; $20.99 ebook)

The Ohio River falls short of the mighty Mississippi in the American mythos, and authors John A. Jakle and Dannel McCollum lament that the former "never had a Mark Twain to champion" it (p.ix), but this book recovers much of the Ohio's relevance to American history. The river's central importance to antebellum western settlement and commerce, as well as the border it signified between slave and free states, are well known. This book looks primarily at the twentieth century through the medium of postcards, which flourished in popularity at the turn of the century. As the authors show, postcards provide historians not only with snapshots of what cities and towns looked like, they also give insight into what printers considered positive signs of urban growth and vitality. From Pittsburgh to Cairo...