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Religious traditions are rich with stories of pilgrimage, a journey for spiritual enrichment that involves travel to a place of meaning. This chapter reveals how people of faith made a pilgrimage to eastern Kentucky to experience firsthand the devastating impacts of mountaintop removal on God’s land and the people of Appalachia. The journey described in this chapter involved twelve interfaith pilgrims in an encounter with mountaintop removal that included flying over the mountains, hiking on mining sites, praying with local ministers, and scattering wildflower seeds on mined earth. This chapter highlights the work of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, which helped coordinate the experience. The spiritual journey revealed lessons for other faith communities: connecting pilgrimages to sacred places, working with local organizations, creating an immersion experience, using prayer as a grounding force, hearing testimonies of faith, and reflecting on feelings and actions.

The myth surrounding Kentuckians was that they were skilled warriors who excelled at attacking Native Americans. This won them special hatred on the part of Native Americans that boiled over in the War of 1812. Kentuckians celebrated their military renown. Kentucky was the key to the war in the Northwest because west of the Appalachians Kentucky had more residents than any other state and its economy was the most advanced. President James Madison relied on militia to fight the war, and in the West he relied on the Kentucky militia. In the War of 1812, nonregular Kentucky soldiers demonstrated that they could fight as well as regulars. With the support of a small detachment of regular army soldiers they won the strategic battle of the Thames that with Perry's victory on Lake Erie achieved American control of Upper Canada.

The fall of 1861 witnessed the consolidation of opposing positions in Kentucky and along the Mississippi River, in addition to seemingly endless work to organize, train, and supply regiments for service in the field. When thousands of Kentuckians enlisted in the Union army by the end of 1861, the Confederates sought ways to entice the Kentucky soldiers to desert the Union army and join the Confederate army instead.

In this case of mountaintop removal for coal in the Appalachian Mountains of the United States, Laura Bozzi explores the delicate insider-outsider tension of keep-it-in-the ground (KIIG) politics. Mountaintop removal activists recognize both the deep sense of place, history, and culture of the peoples of Appalachia and the impacts of mountaintop removal and coal on local and global ecosystems. This chapter shows how the quick violence of destroying mountains, streams, and rivers creates a slow violence of lung cancer and other diseases, along with diminished educational, employment, and retirement opportunities. Appalachian peoples are effectively pursuing a KIIG politics based on the reality of decreasing coal reserves, ever-increasing mechanization, and declining market share on the one hand, and a dire need for a solution that marries well-being and livelihood on the other. Finally, this chapter explores the uneasy transition of fear of a way of life for locals with the lack of transparency of coal companies.

This chapter shows the postwar social order Kentuckians faced that bore little resemblance to the world they had known before. As Kentucky Confederate Basil Duke wrote decades later in his memoirs, “No such metamorphosis, perhaps, has been produced in so brief a period,” with the exception of the French Revolution. “The life of the postbellum South,” he concluded, “no more resembled that of the [antebellum] than the life of the early settlers of this continent was like [that] they had left on the other side of the ocean.” Kentucky at the war's close was a world of disorder. Fields, farms, and infrastructure lay in ruins, as did the social and familial relationships of families and neighbors. There was the human cost as well. Nearly 30,000, or one in five, Kentuckians who fought had lost their lives.

This chapter shows how Lincoln continued to craft and test ideas about the war's course and its relationship to God's purpose. He told a delegation of Kentuckians, “I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think, and feel.” Later putting down these thoughts on paper, Lincoln explained to Albert G. Hodges, a Kentucky newspaper editor, how, despite his own constitutional scruples and natural conservatism, his hand had been forced on the emancipation question. He then added a paragraph that injected a new set of themes. Here was some of the old fatalism—presumably a revealing passage for biographers. These points meshed well with the views of many northern clergy but also carried a deeper sense of awe and humility all too often missing from their sermons.

This chapter examines the New York City draft riots and the war on the home front, the draft resistance, as well as the northern political canvass that would lead to Republican victories in the fall elections. It also describes the ongoing struggle to incentivise volunteers to enlist.