In 1963, Harry M. Caudill, a Whitesburg, Ky., attorney and former state legislator, published Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area. This first and most important of his eight books was very much in the vein of such others of the early 1960s as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Michael Harrington’s The Other America. In the finest muckraking tradition, Caudill laid bare the tragic story of the ravages wrought by the mining industry in his beloved mountains. Night Comes to the Cumberlands almost immediately captured national as well as international attention, and Harry M. Caudill became THE voice of Appalachia. Before Caudill’s death by his own hand in 1990, he and his wife, Anne Frye Caudill, deposited their voluminous personal records in Special Collections in the Margaret I. King Library at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Margaret Ripley Wolfe, professor of history and a nationally and internationally recognized authority on the history of the South and Southern Appalachia, is now involved in research for a comprehensive biography of Harry M. Caudill. She expects to see the biography in print in about five years.
Dr. Colin Baxter has authored two studies published by Greenwood Press in their series "Battles and Leaders." The Normandy Campaign, 1944: A Selected Bibliography (1993), critically assessed and evaluated the significant literature on the Battle of Normandy during World War II. A series of historiographical essays that introduced various facets of the campaign to the reader, Professor Baxter’s study is an essential handbook to the Normandy Invasion and is intended to be a useful research aid to both the general reader and the experienced scholar. Similarly, his most recent book, The War in North Africa, 1940-1943: A Selected Bibliography (1996), is designed to assist researchers in finding their way through the labyrinth of sources on one of the major campaigns of World War II.
Mack Morriss of Elizabethton was a noted war correspondent during World War II and covered the campaigns of Guadalcanal and New Georgia in the Solomons and the Allied offensive in Western Europe. For the past six years, Dr. Ronnie Day, chairman of the ETSU history department, has been working with the Morriss papers and his edition of Mack Morriss’ South Pacific Diary, 1942-1943, which was published by the University Press of Kentucky last year. The book provides significant information on the Army’s role on Guadalcanal and has been used as background research by a major motion picture company now producing a film based on James Jones’ novel, The Thin Red Line. Day is presently working on a biography of Morriss (expected completion in two years) and doing the research for a book on New Georgia centered on the military campaign there and its effect on the culture of the archipelago. This book is expected to be completed in the next five years.
Day also has written a feature article illustrated by 65 photographs on the Battle for New Georgia for the British military magazine, After the Battle, which is scheduled for publication this year. The documentary film, Lost Warriors of the South Pacific, for which Day did some of the writing, served as a commentator in the film, and received the research credit, is planned to be released to cable television.