Two hundred years after it was wrested from the Native Americans, KENTUCKY still hasn't quite made up its mind as to whether it belongs in the North or the South. Both the rival presidents in the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, were born here, and divisions were acute between slave-owning farmers and the merchants who depended on trade with the nearby cities of the industrial North. Officially neutral, seventy thousand Kentuckians joined the Union army and forty thousand the Confederates. After the war Kentucky sided with the South in its hostility to Reconstruction, and since then it has remained solidly Democrat.

Kentucky's rugged beauty is at its most appealing in the mountainous east and the small historic towns of the Bluegrass Downs , with visits enlivened by the varied attractions of bourbon whiskey, thoroughbred horses and bluegrass music. Louisville , home of the Kentucky Derby , is a busy manufacturing and arts center; the more reserved Lexington , eighty miles east, is a major horse-breeding market.