Thomas D. Clark of Kentucky: an Uncommon Life in the Commonwealth.

Thomas D. Clark of Kentucky: An Uncommon Life in the Commonwealth. Edited by John E. Kleber. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, c. 2003. Pp. xii, 256. $25.00, ISBN 0-8131-2297-X.)

In late 2003 a doctoral student wrote asking me if I knew of "a T. D. Clark" who taught at the University of Kentucky during the 1940s and 1950s. Though the Southern Historical Association honored Thomas Dionysius Clark by bestowing its presidency on him in 1947, appointing him editor of the Journal of Southern History (1949-1952), and celebrating his distinguished career at a special session at its 2003 annual meeting, today Clark unfortunately remains little known and little appreciated beyond the commonwealth of Kentucky.

Born in 1903, Clark is in fact a living legend among historians of the South. After completing his Ph.D. at Duke University in 1932, with few resources at his disposal, he almost single-handedly built Kentucky's history department into a major doctoral program in southern history. At one point its star-studded faculty included Albert D. Kirwan, Clement Eaton, James F. Hopkins, Holman Hamilton, Steven A. Channing, and Charles P. Roland. Meanwhile Clark established himself as one of the most original and prolific historians of the frontier, Kentucky, and the South. His influential books constitute almost a library by themselves and include The Beginning of the L & N (Louisville, Ky., 1933), A History of Kentucky (New York, 1937), Pills, Petticoats, and Plows (Indianapolis, 1944), The Rural Press and the New South (Baton Rouge, 1948), The Southern Country Editor (Indianapolis, 1948), Travels in the Old South (Norman, Okla., 1956), The Emerging South (New York, 1961), Travels in the New South (Norman, Okla., 1962), and The South Since Appomattox (New York, 1967) with Albert D. Kirwan. Recognizing his reputation beyond the region, historians elected Clark president of the Organization of American Historians in 1957.

Thomas D. Clark of Kentucky consists of fifteen essays that celebrate Clark's extraordinarily rich and productive professional life. Walter A. Baker sketches Clark's biography and James C. Klotter, Nancy Disher Baird, Carol Crowe Carraco, and Charles P. Roland examine his contributions to historical scholarship. Lowell H. Harrison provides a bibliographic essay. William E. Ellis, Robert F. Sexton, John Ed Pearce, William Marshall, and Wm. Jerome Crouch evaluate Clark's work promoting educational reform, preservation, scholarly publishing, and other causes. Mary Wilma Hargreaves, Wade Hall, Leonard P. Curry, James Duane Bolin, and Edward M. Coffman assess, respectively, Clark as colleague, southern writer, friend, "inspirer," and mentor.

Though Clark's works in the field of southern history are significant, he will be remembered most for his heroic efforts as a historian and promoter of serious study of history in the commonwealth of Kentucky. According to Klotter, in three books--A History of Kentucky (New York, 1937), The Kentucky (New York, 1942), and Kentucky: Land of Contrast (New York, 1968)--Clark mapped out Kentucky's past, commented critically on its present, and suggested avenues for an improved future. Clark, Klotter notes, "began his work when few sizeable research collections existed in the state and when the diligent researcher had to go almost door to door to locate possible materials. [He] has helped change all that ..." (p. 16).

Marshall explains how, correctly crediting Clark with building from the ground up the University of Kentucky's special collections and archives unit, for securing funding to start and maintain The Papers of Henry Clay (10 vols. and supp.; Lexington, Ky., 1959-1992), and for mobilizing funding and support for the Kentucky Historical Society's state-of-the-art History Center, which opened in 1999. Clark, Marshall explains, "literally saved the state's public archives from destruction in 1936, he is directly responsible for the creation of the Kentucky state archives through the passage of a model archives law in 1958, and after almost fifty years of lobbying he succeeded in persuading state government to provide the archives with a modern building" (p. 123).

Unfortunately this book would have benefited from more careful editing. It suffers from repetition of themes and encomiums, erroneous bibliographical and index references, and inconsistent biographical information. Nevertheless, Thomas D. Clark of Kentucky succeeds in reminding us of Clark's importance and his ubiquity in twentieth-century southern and Kentucky historiography.

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

JOHN DAVID SMITH