The crisis provoked by the terrifying journey into the boundless wilderness of the new republic is represented in much early American literature by a pattern of release, panic, and return, as exemplified in Bird's Nick of the Woods . The true story of Margaret Garner, the northern Kentucky slave who escaped, was recaptured, and attempted to kill her children rather than see them returned to slavery. In The Simpsons the satiric message is often undercut by audiences focused on the pleasure of commodification or identification. The contradictory desires of producers and audiences lead to a diffusion of the show's satire as the viewers create their own spaces of resistance within and against the show's discourse. Robert Wickliffe was perhaps Kentucky's largest slaveholder.
Vernacular buildings occur across the length and breadth of Tennessee.
Whether of log, frame, brick, or stone, many of them share some of the same features, and even to the trained eye sometimes look very much alike. Although the Bluegrass region had more silversmiths, the state's southcentral area's artisans enjoyed enviable reputations before the Civil War. Artifacts, letters, diaries, advertisements, inventories, wills, deeds, court cases and other records enable a look at life in antebellum southcentral Kentucky as reflected by the work of almost two dozen silversmiths. Drawing from both history and folklore, especially folk music, Davidson created for himself and other embattled traditionalists a myth of Southern history and culture as the last stronghold of an organic, communal, agrarian way of life that faced annihilation by the onslaught of modernity. Although Davidson is viewed by historians as the least relevant of the Agrarians, his vision of the South as a distinct, traditional culture seems to have survived the passage of time, particularly among defenders of a unique Southern identity.