The courting among a city and its neighborhood associations of upper schooling is usually fraught with turmoil. The advanced tensions among the identification of a urban and the nature of a college can problem either groups. Lexington, Kentucky, monitors those attribute conflicts, with old academic associations inside its urban limits: Transylvania collage, the 1st university west of the Allegheny Mountains, and the college of Kentucky, previously "State College." An investigative cultural background of town that referred to as itself "The Athens of the West," Taking the city: Collegiate and neighborhood tradition in Lexington, Kentucky, 1880--1917 depicts the origins and improvement of this dating on the flip of the 20 th century. Lexington's place within the higher South makes it a wealthy zone for exam. regardless of a heritage of turmoil and violence, Lexington's universities function catalysts for switch. until eventually the booklet of this e-book, Lexington was once nonetheless characterised by means of educational interpretations that mostly think of Southern highbrow lifestyles an oxymoron. Kolan Thomas Morelock illuminates how highbrow lifestyles flourished in Lexington from the interval following Reconstruction to the nation's access into the 1st global struggle. Drawing from neighborhood newspapers and different basic assets from round the quarter, Morelock bargains a accomplished examine early town-gown dynamics in a urban of contradictions. He illuminates Lexington's identification via investigating the lives of a few influential personalities from the period, together with Margaret Preston and Joseph Tanner. concentrating on literary societies and dramatic golf equipment, the writer inspects the influence of social and academic collage organisations at the town's pop culture from the Gilded Age to the revolutionary period. Morelock's paintings is an enlightening research of the intersection among pupil and citizen highbrow existence within the Bluegrass urban in the course of an period of profound swap and development. Taking town explores an ignored element of Lexington's historical past in the course of a time within which town used to be setting up its cultural and highbrow identity.