{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03528670447385003, 'fraction_numerical': 0.004410838059231254, 'mean_word_length': 5.203125, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Here Comes the Fear—Again

“Lie still and go to sleep, or the Shawnees will catch you,” Kentucky women warned their children at the start of the nineteenth century, using fears of Native American bogeymen to discipline their children (Friend, p. 256). In the antebellum period when Kentuckians’ anger was “waxing warm,” the Warsaw Patriot, in order to silence abolitionists’ “demon spirits” (Harrold, p. 81), called for capital punishment for anyone convicted of circulating antislavery documents. Finally, in the postebellum South, with Kentucky wracked by violence, the New York Times stated “the peaceable people of Kentucky are to-day in more danger from outlaws and murderers of their own race than they were at the dawn of the century from hostile Indians” (Marshall, p. 79). Whether found in bedtime stories or on the pages of the New York Times, fear, with its unique combination of universality and divisiveness, plays a special role in Kentucky’s history. Fear of external invasion and internal subversion haunted white Kentuckians from the settlement of the region to the emergence of modern Kentucky in the twentieth century. But, rather than let fear cripple them, Kentuckians embraced it to define themselves against their real and imagined enemies. Taken in sequence, Craig Thompson Friend’s Kentucke’s Frontiers, Stanley Harrold’s Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War, and Anne Marshall’s Creating Confederate Kentucky, provide a history of Kentucky from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth; yet at each stage of development, fear drives