Kentucky Rising: Democracy, Slavery, and Culture from the Early Republic to the Civil Wart is sometimes said that Kentucky joined the South after the Civil War, and many books have been devoted to studying the influence of the war and its aftermath on the Commonwealth. But less is known about the decades before the Civil War. In Generations of Hope: Kentucky, 1800 1865, James Ramage and Andrea Watkins explore this crucial but often overlooked period, finding that that the early years of statehood comprised an era of great hope and