Shaping Southern Memory

Abstract

Possessing a strong regional self-consciousness, American South provides an exceptionally rich proving ground for notion that past has currency. In recent years, a cottage industry in memory studies has tied identity, political culture, and power relations to how southerners have viewed history. In 1980s, studies by Gaines Foster and Charles Reagan Wilson considered Lost Cause as an important cultural moment; subsequent work by William Blair and Karen Cox reexamines Lost Cause in light of considerations of race and gender, suggesting that southern memory was contested terrain. These studies, along with David Blight's Race and Reunion (2002), stress how memory of American Civil War involved a larger struggle for cultural authority.' These works also illustrate a constant struggle over past: in control of memory also exert extraordinary authority. One might wonder what could be added to this already full literature-and whether it is possible to say anything new about subject. Yet in his nicely written, imaginatively conceived, and cogently argued book, W. Fitzhugh Brundage provides a fresh approach, perspective, and insight; this study contains many intriguing twists and turns, defies predictability, often upsets conventional wisdom, and challenges our notions of how past was used. Like many scholars, Brundage sees historical memory not simply as the articulation of some shared subconscious, but rather product of intentional creation. The recalled past thus consists of those common remembrances that identify a group, giving it a sense of its past and defining its aspirations for future. Collective remembering, he says, forges identity, justifies privilege, and sustains cultural norms, supplying a kind of genealogy of social identity (p. 4). Encompassing period from Civil War to present, Southern Past is more broadly and sweepingly considered than any previous study of southern historical memory. In contrast to other historians who have stressed memory of Civil War, he sees key event as slavery and freedom and African Americans' struggle for equality, existing