Kenneth D. Tunnell, Once Upon a Place: The Fading of Community in Rural Kentucky

Authors

Travis Linnemann, Old Dominion University

Abstract

"It is difficult to think of the rural apart from rolling hills and green fields that offer a respite from the city’s disquiet. Along with images of a bucolic rurality however, is a darker anti-idyll that has loomed in the social imaginary for centuries. While the narrative is timeless, the rural’s decline is something few among us have lived or even cared to witness first-hand. However, in the pages of Kenneth D. Tunnell’s Once Upon a Place, we travel to the disregarded landscapes of rural Kentucky and witness the history of its struggles. Like looking out the window of an old pickup truck as it bounces down a country road, Tunnell delivers us to the various sites where the time honored rural idyll is vanishing. This is a story of a land where tobacco once was, but no longer is king. With serious but accessible academic writing animated by more than 60 mournful photos, Once Upon a Place documents the abandoned farms, decaying buildings and lives cut adrift in a shifting and uncertain political economy."

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Linnemann, Travis (2014) "Kenneth D. Tunnell, Once Upon a Place: The Fading of Community in Rural Kentucky," Qualitative Criminology (QC): Vol. 2: No. 1, Article 10.
Available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/qc/vol2/iss1/10