Book description
When Thomas D. Clark was hired to teach history at the University of
Kentucky in 1931, he began a career that would span nearly
three-quarters of a century and would profoundly change not only the
history department and the university but the entire Commonwealth. His
still-definitive History of Kentucky (1937) was one of more than thirty
books he would write or edit that dealt with Kentucky, the South, and
the American frontier. In addition to his wide scholarly contributions,
Clark devoted his life to the preservation of Kentucky's historical
records. He began this crusade by collecting vast stores of Kentucky's
military records from the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Civil
War. His efforts resulted in the Commonwealth's first archival system
and the subsequent creation of the Kentucky Library and Archives, the
University of Kentucky Special Collections and Archives, the Kentucky
Oral History Commission, the Kentucky History Center (recently named for
him), and the University Press of Kentucky. Born in 1903 on a cotton
farm in Louisville, Mississippi, Thomas Dionysius Clark would follow a
long and winding path to find his life's passion in the study of
history. He dropped out of school after seventh grade to work first at a
sawmill and then on a canal dredgeboat before resuming his formal
education. Clark's earliest memories-hearing about local lynch-mob
violence and witnessing the destruction of virgin forest-are an
invaluable window into the national issues of racial injustice and
environmental depredation. In many ways, the story of Dr. Clark's life
is the story of America in the twentieth century. In My Century in
History, Clark offers vivid memories of his journey, both personal and
academic, a journey that took him from Mississippi to Kentucky and North
Carolina, to leadership of the nation's major historical organizations,
and to visiting professorships in Austria, England, Greece, and India,
as well as in universities throughout the United States. An enormously
popular public lecturer and teacher, he touched thousands of lives in
Kentucky and around the world. With his characteristic wit and insight,
Clark now offers his many admirers one final volume of history-his own.
