An exhibit celebrating the career of children’s book illustrator Dorothy Grider opened at the Kentucky Library & Museum on July 1, 2009. Driven to become an artist from the age of eight, this Bowling Green native became Rand McNally’s most popular children’s book illustrator in the late 1940s, and her work often stood alone in coloring books, picture books, and activity publications. Illustrating more than 100 books, including six as both author and illustrator, her work is available today in more than 200 libraries around the world.
Monthly Archives: July 2009
An Illustrious Career
Civil War Diary Edited by Nancy Baird Receives Award
The Military Order of the Stars and Bars has selected Josie Underwood’s Civil War Diary, edited by Nancy Disher Baird as the winner of the 2009 Basil W. Duke Award, which recognizes the publisher who reissues the best work in Confederate history.
Available for the first time in print, Josie Underwood’s Civil War Diary offers a vivid, firsthand account of a family that owned slaves and opposed Lincoln, yet remained unshakably loyal to the Union. Josie’s father, Warner, played an important role in keeping Kentucky from seceding. Among the many highlights of the diary is Josie’s record of meeting the president in wartime Washington, which served to soften her opinion of him. Josie describes her fear of secession and war, and the anguish of having relatives and friends fighting on opposite sides, noting in the spring of 1861 that many friendships and families were breaking up “faster than the Union.” The diary also brings to life the fears, frustrations, and deprivations of living under occupation in strategically important Bowling Green, KY known as the “Gibraltar of the Confederacy” during the war. Despite the wartime upheaval, Josie’s life is also refreshingly normal at times and she recounts travel, parties, local gossip, and the search for her “true Prince.”
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