Bloody Breathitt: Politics and Violence in the Appalachian South

“Eudora Welty once said that ‘One place comprehended can make us understand other places better.’ Nowhere has local history proved so vital to understanding region as it has for Appalachian scholarship, as this latest entry in the field amply demonstrates. Like the best of those ‘one place’ studies, Hutton’s masterful portrait of Kentucky’s Breathitt County offers both compelling stories and insightful analysis of the multiple forms of violence that played out in this most notorious of highland South locales, while shedding considerable light on how such brutal power struggles played out elsewhere in the region and well beyond.”