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Janice Holt Giles (March 28, 1905 – June 1, 1979) was an American writer who lived near Knifley in Adair County, Kentucky.
She was born Janice Meredith Holt on March 28, 1905, in Altus, Arkansas to John Albert Holt and Lucy Elizabeth (née McGraw); both her— parents were teachers. She had two younger siblings, Mary Catherine Holt Sullivan (July 9, 1907 - January 8, 1995) and John Albert Holt Jr. (January 11, 1910 - February 23, 1974). Janice Holt worked for a number of years with a number of church-affiliated clerical jobs, first in Oklahoma and then in Kentucky, having moved to Frankfort in 1939 subsequent to her divorce that year from her first husband Otto Moore, whom she had wed in 1927. In 1941 Janice Holt obtained a position as secretary at the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
In 1945 Janice Holt married Henry Giles, who was eleven years her junior. After first becoming acquainted on a 40-hour bus trip in 1943, the couple had subsequently courted via letters to and from Europe, where Henry Giles was serving in the military, and were married the same day Henry returned to the United States. The couple lived in Louisville until 1949, when they took up residence in Adair County within two miles of the area where Henry's ancestors had settled in 1803. They subsequently constructed a house, which took four years to complete, from the logs of four pioneer cabins. They lived there until Janice died of congestive heart failure in 1979. Henry Giles died in 1986 and was buried next to Janice in the Caldwell Chapel Separate Baptist Church cemetery in Knifley.
Giles began her writing career with an entry to a fiction contest in 1949 while still working at the Presbyterian Seminary in Louisville. Between 1950 and 1975 Giles wrote twenty-four books which were published. Noted primarily for her historical novels set in Kentucky - beginning with her debut novel The Enduring Hills - or on the Western frontier, she also wrote contemporary fiction set in the Kentucky hills, as well as autobiographical and nonfiction works, some of them co-authored with Henry. Her works include the Piney Woods trilogy, consisting of The Enduring Hills (1950), Miss Willie (1951), and Tara's Healing (1952), and the Kentucky trilogy, consisting of The Kentuckians (1953), Hannah Fowler (1956), and The Believers (1957). The Janice Holt Giles and Henry Giles Society was established in 1996 to preserve the literary legacy of Janice Holt Giles and Henry Giles and to restore their log home.
Giles's historical fiction works form a study of early American pioneer life in Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico among other states. Her accounts are accurate geographically and historically and are tied together by the fictitious Cooper, Fowler and Cartwright families. Real historical figures from Giles's novels include Ben Logan, Daniel Boone, James Harrod, William Whitley, James Wilkinson, Gen. Matthew Arbuckle, and Sam Houston. She also provides a realistic historical perspective of the relationships between Native Americans, White Settlers and African Americans. The interested reader can gain a solid understanding of the early process of national (United States) expansion by reading the listed volumes in the following order.
(approximate period covered; primary geographical settings)
Adair County is a county located in the U.S. state of Kentucky. As of the 2020 census, the population was 18,903. Its county seat and only municipality is Columbia. The county was founded in 1801 and named for John Adair, then Speaker of the House in Kentucky and later Governor of Kentucky. Adair County has some of the few surviving American Chestnut trees in the United States.
Scouting in Kentucky has a long history, from the 1910s to the present day, serving thousands of youth in programs that suit the environment in which they live. Kentucky has a very early Scouting heritage, as the home state of Daniel Carter Beard.
Heather Renee French Henry is a Miss America title holder, fashion designer, and veterans advocate. She is married to former Kentucky Lieutenant Governor Steve Henry.
John Adair was an American pioneer, slave trader, soldier, and politician. He was the eighth Governor of Kentucky and represented the state in both the U.S. House and Senate. A native of South Carolina, Adair enlisted in the state militia and served in the Revolutionary War, during which he was twice captured and held as a prisoner of war by the British. Following the War, he was elected as a delegate to South Carolina's convention to ratify the United States Constitution.
The University Press of Kentucky (UPK) is the scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth of Kentucky, and was organized in 1969 as successor to the University of Kentucky Press. The university had sponsored scholarly publication since 1943. In 1949, the press was established as a separate academic agency under the university president, and the following year Bruce F. Denbo, then of Louisiana State University Press, was appointed as the first full-time professional director. Denbo served as director of UPK until his retirement in 1978, building a small but distinguished list of scholarly books with emphasis on American history and literary criticism.
J. Ellsworth Kalas was a president and a professor of Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. He also served as pastor for 38 years in the Wisconsin and Ohio Conferences of the United Methodist Church and was associated for 5 years with the World Methodist Council.
John Gabriel Jones was a colonial American pioneer and politician. An early settler of Kentucky, he and George Rogers Clark sought to petition Virginia to allow Kentucky to become a part of the Colony of Virginia at the outset of the American Revolution.
Col. Johannes "John" Bowman was an 18th-century American pioneer, colonial militia officer and sheriff, the first appointed in Lincoln County, Kentucky. In 1781 he also presided as a justice of the peace over the first county court held in Kentucky. The first county-lieutenant and military governor of Kentucky County during the American Revolutionary War, Col. Bowman also, served in the American Revolution, many times, second in command to General George Rogers Clark, during the Illinois Campaign, which, at the time, doubled the size of the United States.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the United States Commonwealth of Kentucky:
Edgar Young Mullins was a Southern Baptist minister and educator, who from 1899 until his death was the fourth president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the flagship school of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Beverle Graves Myers is an American author of mystery novels and short stories. Her major work is the Tito Amato mystery series set in 18th-century Venice, published by Poisoned Pen Press. She is also the co-author, with Joanne Dobson, of a stand-alone crime novel set in New York City on the eve of World War II. Myers' novels are traditional mysteries which feature a large cast of characters, a deep sense of time and place, and meticulously researched period details. Myers' short stories are set in a variety of times and places; several stories feature her series characters.
Suzanne Post was a civil rights activist in the struggle against discrimination and social injustice in Kentucky. She was born to Morris and Betty Kling in Louisville, Kentucky on March 19, 1933. She joined a student branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People while a student at Indiana University, and continued her student activism at the University of California Berkeley. In her long career, she advocated for social justice and led the way in the battle for civil rights, women's rights, LGBTQ rights, and equity in housing and education. Her Uncle Arthur Kling helped found the Kentucky Civil Liberties Union in 1955 and served on the Board of the Louisville Urban League. Michael Aldridge, a former ACLU director, in an article for the Louisville Courier Journal, wrote "the Kling family 's own personal experience with bigotry, and a shared memory of historic oppression and violence, made them fight all prejudice and restrictions on the civil liberties of others".
McDonald Brothers founded in 1878 was a Louisville-based firm of architects of courthouses and other public buildings. It was a partnership of brothers Kenneth McDonald, Harry McDonald, and Donald McDonald.
Mary Virginia Cook Parrish taught, wrote and spoke on many issues such as women's suffrage, equal rights in the areas of employment and education, social and political reform, and the importance of religion and a Christian education. She was at the founding session of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 at the 19th Street Baptist Church in Washington D.C. She was an early proponent of Black Baptist feminism and founder of the National Baptist Women's Convention in 1900.
Eleanor Mercein Kelly was an American writer of fiction and nonfiction. She wrote one biographical study, The Chronicle of a Happy Woman: Emily A. Davison (1928), but is best known for her romantic fiction, most of which was set in exotic locales. She was widely traveled, and used her travels as inspiration for her novels. Four of her stories were adapted to film and one on Broadway.
Christine Roy Yoder is J. McDowell Richards Professor of Biblical Interpretation at Columbia Theological Seminary, and an ordained minister of word and sacrament in the Presbyterian Church (USA). She is currently serving as interim dean of faculty and vice president for academic affairs.
Elmer Lucille Allen is a ceramic artist and chemist who graduated from Nazareth College in 1953. Both her father and brother were named Elmer and the family chose to name her Elmer Lucille. She became the first African-American chemist at Brown-Forman in 1966.
Amanda Matthews is an American sculptor and painter from Louisville, Kentucky, United States, who lives in Lexington, Kentucky.
Margaret Verble is a Native American author and citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Her debut novelMaud's Line was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Cherokee America won the Spur Award for Best Traditional Western in 2020, and When Two Feathers Fell from the Sky was picked by Booklist as one of the Best Fiction Books of the Year in 2021.
Mary R. T. McAboy was a 19th-century poet of the American south. From 1850, she was a contributor to the press of Kentucky and elsewhere over the signature of "M. R. M., Roseheath, Ky."; her writings were universally popular.
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