Lee Durham Stone completed an M.A. in the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History program through Gettysburg College in May 2023. Its title indicates its subject and his interests: “White Identity, Regionalism, and the Geographic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Kentucky.” It explores how the Bluegrass State became southern and neo-Confederate, primarily through racial domination. A decade earlier, he completed a Ph.D. at Texas State University. So, what was his journey to this book?
Dr. Stone’s first view of the wider world came with the large box of U. S. postage stamps his mother collected during World War II, handed to him at age six. Subsequently, he purchased stamps of countries and colonies worldwide. He placed the brightly colored, exotically pictured stamps—for example, from Andorra and the British colonies of Bechuanaland, Rhodesia, and Tanganyika—in stamp-collection albums. Thus, the hobby of philately was the initial impetus for developing his geographic imagination. Likewise, history books found on his home bookshelves developed his historical consciousness.
A few years later, Stone’s grandmother began bringing issues of National Geographic, the prosaic beginnings of many of the geographically minded today. He plastered his walls with colorful maps and wondered about the faraway lands represented there. He became an example of what cultural geographer Carl Sauer intimated about the need for personal proximity to maps: “Show me a geographer who does not need them constantly and want them about him.” In his adolescent study of his wall maps, the young Stone became, like Miles Harvey, a mapperist: “an ecstatic contemplator of things cartographic.” As a young cartophile—a “maphead”—he continued developing a global geographic imagination with history always a part.
As a young adult, Stone intellectually reacted to what he judged as his father’s small-town provincialism. His father was a hometown journalist and local-colorist columnist. In
contrast, at the University of Kentucky, Dr. Stone discovered academic geography (a B.A. in 1970) as a subject that spoke to what he had been interested in from childhood. Later, he returned to college to obtain an A.A.S. degree in Land Reclamation from Madisonville Community College to work for the Kentucky State Department of Natural Resources as a strip mine inspector in deeply “hollered” Appalachia. There, he trained to read the physical landscape.
Later, when he arrived at a teaching position on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in 1996, Dr. Stone also held an M.A. in Geography (Ohio University), an M.A. in International Affairs (Ohio University), an M.S. in International Agricultural Development (California Polytechnic State University), and an M.Ed. in Secondary Social Studies (University of Southern Mississippi). He began teaching geography and social studies per his academic training and the influence of three and half years with the U. S. Peace Corps in Jamaica and some extended stays in other overseas places (e.g., a year teaching in Taiwan, and four and half months living in the rainforest of Costa Rica).
Stone had become what he thought was a social studies teacher par excellence with the proper perspective on spatial affairs: A teacher who taught the primacy of global connections. Besides, he had nearly become what writer Pico Iyer called a “global soul,” a serial migrant who attempts to be “at home in exile.” To wit: In the 20 years between 1976 and 1996, Stone traveled to a couple of dozen countries, sometimes staying for months at a time, and moved residences more than eight times—Kentucky to Jamaica to Ohio to California to Taiwan, back to California and on to Mississippi, Tennessee, finally returning to the Bluegrass State in 2012.
Stone was participating in a pedagogy that dragged his students along with him in cognizing the whole planet before they ever considered the local place where they were living, which in a deeply existential way, he and they should have recognized as “home.”
This story returns full circle. Beginning a couple of years after World War II, the Stone family newspaper, with a great deal of intent, placed under the masthead this spatial delimitation and geographic perspective: “As far as this newspaper is concerned, the sun rises in the Green [the river delineating the eastern border] and sets in the Pond [river on the western border]” of Muhlenberg County. Stone began to appreciate this parochial view in his eighth decade of life (although it does nothing to tackle broader spatial problems like environmental pollution).
A decade ago, with the local in mind and as he began searching for sources to learn more about the Black experience in Kentucky, especially the western region and Muhlenberg, Dr. Stone discovered these words of the Nobel Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Toni Morrison: “If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” Her words propelled his thinking that he might be the singular person to research and write a hitherto mostly unwritten story focusing on the Black experience in Muhlenberg and western Kentucky.
As a self-identified Kentuckian and Muhlenberger, Stone also felt obligated to investigate a story about the place-world in which he grew up. As Stewart Udall observed, “If you would find yourself, look to the land from which you came and to which you go.” Through his studies, Stone discovered that learning geographic history—especially the history of a place—is also a voyage of self-discovery. Hopefully, this book has helped the reader travel over this self-teaching cultural landscape.
