Hard Times and New Deal in Kentucky

Hard Times and New Deal in Kentucky PDF

Author: George T. Blakey

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2014-07-15

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 0813162130

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The Great Depression and the New Deal touched the lives of almost every Kentuckian during the 1930s. Fifty years later the Commonwealth is still affected by the legacies of that era and the policies of the Roosevelt administration. George T. Blakey has written the first full study of this turbulent decade in Kentucky, and he offers a fresh perspective on the New Deal programs by viewing them from the local and state level rather than from Washington. Thousands of Kentuckians worked for New Deal programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Projects Administration; thousands more kept their homes through loans from the Home Owners Loan Corporation. Tobacco growers adopted new production techniques and rural farms received their first electricity because of the Agricultural Adjustment and Rural Electrification administrations. The New Deal stretched from the Harlan County coal mines to a TVA dam near Paducah, and it encompassed subjects as small as Social Security pension checks and as large as revived Bourbon distilleries. The impact of these phenomena on Kentucky was both beneficial and disruptive, temporary and enduring. Blakey analyzes the economic effects of this unprecedented and massive government spending to end the depression. He also discusses the political arena in which Governors Laffoon, Chandler, and Johnson had to wrestle with new federal rules. And he highlights social changes the New Deal brought to the Commonwealth: accelerated urbanization, enlightened land use, a lessening of state power and individualism, and a greater awareness of Kentucky history. Hard Times and New Deal weaves together private memories of older Kentuckians and public statements of contemporary politicians; it includes legislative debates and newspaper accounts, government statistics and personal reminiscences. The result is a balanced and fresh look at the patchwork of emergency and reform activities which many people loved, many others hated, but no one could ignore.

Managing a Land in Motion

Managing a Land in Motion PDF

Author: National Park Service

Publisher: CreateSpace

Published: 2013-06-28

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 9781490555614

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During the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the Point Reyes Peninsula, forty miles farther north along the San Andreas Fault, shook loose from its temporary moorings to the California coastline and lurched to the northwest by some twenty feet. The powerful quake that terrorized the city also tore through the land and jarred the rural inhabitants of Point Reyes. It was another abrupt step in the peninsula's slow creep from southern to northern California, yielding a piece of land quite divergent from the California mainland to which it is now affixed. Although pressure along the San Andreas Fault continued to build for the remainder of the century, there were no other geologic events of a magnitude that could so drastically alter the land's surface. By contrast, human events since 1906 have significantly altered the peninsula's landscape. In the century following the earthquake, economic, cultural, and political forces gradually reshaped Point Reyes. Possibly the biggest tremor took place in 1962, when Congress created, and President John F. Kennedy signed into law, the Point Reyes National Seashore. At that juncture, the political geography of the land, as a new unit of the National Park Service (NPS), was about to change dramatically. This volume, Managing a Land in Motion: An Administrative History of Point Reyes National Seashore, traces, explains, and analyzes the ideas and events that produced the national seashore and transpired in the forty years that followed.

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