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This chapter focuses on James Lane Allen's article in Harper's magazine in which he claimed that there were “two Kentuckys.” Allen's writing fell amid a growing stream of travel and local-color literature about southern Appalachia that had, by the 1880s, introduced the American reading public to the idea that the area comprised a distinctive civilization populated by a unique people. Within this context of Appalachian exceptionalism emerged the idea that Kentucky had endured two divergent Civil War experiences. One featured the landed, slave-owning Bluegrass aristocrats who sided with the South out of custom, kinship, and a proslavery position. In the other, the Kentucky mountaineer, who had little or no contact with the peculiar institution, had, by virtue of his century-long isolation and undiluted devotion to democratic institutions and nationalism, sided with the Union.

This chapter provides the personal circumstances of Madeline McDowell, originally named Magdalen after her father's sister Magdalen Harvey McDowell, but her name was later changed to the French form, Madeline. It notes that Madeline was the sixth and next-to-youngest child of Henry Clay McDowell and Anne Clay McDowell. The chapter observes that her family, with its long history of accomplishment and prominence, its political, social, and business ties, and its wealth, played a major role in the development of her personality, her opportunities, and her achievements. It notes that Madeline was a member of that privileged segment of Bluegrass society described by author and family friend James Lane Allen as “a landed aristocracy” in which “family names come down from generation to generation” and where “one great honored name will do nearly as much in Kentucky as in England to keep a family in peculiar respect.”

Fawn Brodie’s biography of Joseph Smith and related forces generated dissonance for many Latter-day Saints in the 1950s and 1960s. Some like Jerald Tanner, Sandra McGee, and LaMar Petersen left Mormonism, citing LDS Church censorship of source material related to Smith’s first vision as a reason. Historian James B. Allen expected Joseph Smith’s multiple memories to be complex. He was fascinated by the historical record, not fearful of it. He expected it to be ambivalent and open to various interpretations. His approach to it led to the mature scholarship on Smith’s vision in this era as Smith’s 1832 and 1835 accounts came to light.

Drawing on newly discovered accounts (1832, 1835) and lots of contextual research, James Allen and Milton Backman added an alternative memory to the buffer on which the saints could draw for memory resources. Believing historians formed a faithful, complex understanding of Smith’s vision that accounted for the incongruity the critics saw in the historical record. The believing historians selected and related new items to old ones. They showed how new elements could be integrated recursively with the long-established story. The laity hardly noticed, however. Compared to the expanding number of Mormons whose conversions were often tied to the canonized account of Smith’s first vision, Mormon historians were a tiny minority. Publishing their findings did almost nothing to alter the Mormon collective memory or make it more resilient to critics. The disruptive potential of the newly discovered records and ways of interpreting them remained latent, waiting for an information age to unleash it.

This chapter focuses on James Allen’s controversial exhibit Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (2000), a collection of photographs that project both the sites of lynchings (outdoors) and the fact of the lynched body’s suspension above solid ground. It argues that the photographs act in concert to reveal important dimensions of black dispossession. More specifically, the photographs demonstrate how African Americans were denied access to property and (by extension) to citizenship, and thus were “without sanctuary” on American soil. The chapter also looks at lynching’s collateral damages such as dead bodies and other remains that constitute the various items belonging to the lynching narrative. It discusses the concept of privacy in the context of lynching violence and concludes with the contention that the photographs produce a “what’s whose” or a “what belongs to whom” of African American history, rather than a who’s who.

As the number of Mormon converts pushed toward two million in the 1960s, Presbyterian minister Wesley Walters was not able to keep them from becoming Latter-day Saints. But he forced all serious scholars of Mormon history to reconsider the reliability of Joseph Smith’s first vision story with his novel research method and findings. Walters made the case that historical evidence disproved any sizeable revival in Joseph Smith’s vicinity in 1820, and therefore that Smith made up his story later, situating it in the context of a well-documented 1824 revival. Walters’s argument was later criticized for its fallacies of irrelevant proof negative proof, but it caused consternation among Latter-day Saint scholars at the time.

Joseph Smith grew up in a visionary family that lived in a visionary culture, but nothing in the historical record reveals that he told his family about his first vision in the 1820s. Many modern saints easily recall that, when Smith returned home after his vision, he told his mother. But all the historical record—an 1842 redaction to the 1838/39 account—says is that he told his mother what he learned, not how. There is no evidence that he told anyone but the Methodist minister for a decade. There is no known evidence of him relating his experience to family members or others. In 1832, Smith remembered that he could find no one that believed him.