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.
