Southern Memory Research Articles

Review of Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory by Robert E. May

Review of Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory by Robert E. May

Dripping in molasses: Black feminist nostalgia and Kara Walker’s A Subtlety

ABSTRACT Kara Walker is best known for her depictions of sexualized violence and gendered racism during slavery in the form of black paper silhouettes. Scholars such as Salamishah Tillet argue that Walker's art, along with art by some of her post-civil rights contemporaries, offers ‘aesthetic interventions’ to problematic racial histories as part of a larger project of memory reclamation and justice. Walker's A Subtlety, Or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant is another such interventionist project. Debuting in the Williamsburg neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York in May of 2014, A Subtlety explores how a figure like mammy ‘survives as a cultural force that influences and reflects a national conscience’ (Wallace Sanders [2008]. Mammy: a century of race, gender, and southern memory. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 12). And yet, to say that the historical rootedness of the title, sugar sphinx sculpture, and molasses-covered walls and cherub-faced small figures throughout the installation were ambiguous to some spectators, is an understatement. Hundreds of photographs and videos were uploaded to social media sites with people making gestures towards the figure that some critics deemed highly inappropriate. This paper explores how A Subtlety both understands and undermines representations of Black women's bodies and how Black artists in the African diaspora contend with complex cultural signs of the past in the present. Utilizing studies of Black feminist theory and visual culture, I argue that Walker’s A Subtlety – and her art more broadly – offers theoretical and geographic space to ponder where Black pleasure and collective memory can exist in systems of misogynoir, as well as in the Black nostalgic imagination.

Stolen Dreams: The 1955 Cannon Street All-Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War by Chris Lamb

Reviewed by: Stolen Dreams: The 1955 Cannon Street All-Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War by Chris Lamb Robert Greene II Stolen Dreams: The 1955 Cannon Street All-Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War. By Chris Lamb. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. Pp. xxii, 344. $34.95, ISBN 978-1-4962-1945-9.) The history of sport in American life has long been an important place to explore how race, sectionalism, and politics collide. While books such as Jules Tygiel’s Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy (New York, 1983) and Adrian Burgos Jr.’s Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line (Berkeley, 2007) showcase the interplay of sport, cultural, and political histories, Stolen Dreams: The 1955 Cannon Street All-Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War offers another excellent example of this approach. For Chris Lamb, the story of the Cannon Street All-Stars is a stand-in for the larger story of the civil rights struggle in South Carolina. Describing this story of young Black boys who were not allowed to compete in South Carolina’s Little League tournament due to Jim Crow segregation as “inextricably linked to postwar Charleston,” Lamb has written an important history of a Little League ball club and a narrative of Charleston’s long and vexed history of racism (p. 3). The civil rights movement’s history was partially shaped by Jackie Robinson’s 1947 desegregation of Major League Baseball. Whether one argues for a “long civil rights movement” thesis or posits that the civil rights movement as we know it began in the mid-1950s, it is clear that Robinson’s symbolism was a crucial marker for Black American activists and their white liberal allies. The story of the Cannon Street All-Stars, like the slow desegregation of the majors after Robinson’s arrival, illustrates the halting pace of desegregation across American society in the 1950s and 1960s. As Lamb points out, the Cannon Street All-Stars were denied the right to play against white teams in South Carolina just a year after the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision. In another historical irony, the team traveled to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, to accept an invitation to watch the Little League World Series—after being denied a chance to play for it—the same week that Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi. One of the strengths of Lamb’s work is his ability to tie the earlier history of Charleston as a slave port and a flashpoint during Reconstruction to the plight of the Cannon Street All-Stars. For instance, Lamb highlights the Charleston Baseball Riot of 1869. Sparked by a confrontation on a baseball diamond between Black baseball fans and Charleston police, it became both a moment when the Reconstruction-era dreams of Black Americans were confronted with the reality of powerful support for white supremacy and an example of how much baseball was intertwined with American political struggles during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Lamb does an exemplary job of showing how the Cannon Street All-Stars served as a nexus of both change and continuity in South Carolina’s history of racism. For example, he reminds the reader that the white teams’ refusal to play the Cannon Street All-Stars led to the creation of Dixie Youth Baseball, a segregated youth league that “didn’t become integrated” until after its founder’s death, and that continues to play tournaments today (p. 197). He also points out that the Cannon Street All-Stars became an example of how the public [End Page 382] memory of the past is actively shaped by the public. Lamb tells the story of researcher Augustus Holt, whose investigation into why Dixie Youth players (including his son) wore Confederate flags on their uniforms in the early 1990s led to his becoming a prominent voice for greater recognition of the All-Stars in Charleston. Stolen Dreams works as a history told at the intersection of sports, civil rights, and southern memory, reminding readers of how often those fields are closely woven together. Robert Greene II Claflin University Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association

Southern Memory, Southern Metaphor: Representing South Vietnam through the US South

Southern Memory, Southern Metaphor: Representing South Vietnam through the US South

Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory by Robert E. May

Reviewed by: Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory by Robert E. May Eric Herschthal (bio) Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory. By Robert E. May. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Pp. 352. Cloth, $34.95; paper, $27.95.) One of the many stories white southerners liked to tell themselves about slavery—and that some still tell themselves—was that Christmas was the one time of year beloved by all, especially enslaved black Americans. Enslaved people, white southerners claimed, were given a full week off and feted with pot roast, biscuits, rum, and whiskey. Field-workers were invited into the “Big House,” showered with gifts, and given permission to travel to nearby plantations. Writing in 1878, the former South Carolina slave owner Celina E. Means described enslaved people dancing to “the sound of the fiddle and the shouts of laughter” during Christmastime as proof of slavery’s decency—as evidence of the “real condition” of enslaved people (202; italics in original). It is this myth that Robert E. May thoroughly debunks in Yuletide in Dixie, the most exhaustive study to date of enslaved people’s experiences during Christmastime in the Civil War–era South. On the surface, the subject might not seem to demand a book-length study, but May makes a persuasive case for the subject’s significance: white southerners routinely published stories about slaveholders’ Yuletide generosity—before, during, and after the Civil War—in order to justify slavery and postwar segregation. Even today, plantation Christmas tours remain a major moneymaker, offering visitors a sanitized version of the past. These Christmastime mythologies had, and continue to have, real consequences. Stories of Christmastime benevolence made white southerners particularly defensive against abolitionist attacks, May argues, ultimately hastening their decision to secede from the Union. In addition, during the Civil War, the inability of slaveholders to even modestly provide for their enslaved workforce during Christmastime influenced enslaved people’s decisions to abandon their plantations, contributing to the Confederacy’s defeat. And, finally, scenes of enslaved people’s contentment during Christmastime, a fixture of post-Reconstruction literature, secured the Lost Cause narrative, helping to underwrite white supremacy. [End Page 122] May provides ample evidence to back up these core arguments. Yuletide in Dixie draws heavily on the unpublished journals and letters of slave-holders, as well as slave narratives and the Federal Writers’ Project interviews of formerly enslaved people, to challenge several common claims slaveholders made about Christmas. The practice of giving enslaved workers a week off was the exception, not the rule, May shows, arguing that the average holiday break—never fully “off ”—was probably closer to three days. Whippings and slave sales continued unabated. Slaveholders certainly gave their enslaved workers gifts, but these were, he argues, more often necessities—basic clothing, their monthly food ration, and maybe a little candy, if they were lucky. Ultimately, he interprets Christmas gift-giving as a form of “social control” (57), not planter benevolence, with enslaved people having little choice but to feign gratitude. He also devotes a superb chapter to the ways in which enslaved people used a gift-giving game, called “Christmas Gif ’!,” to subtly pressure owners into giving them a bit more of their basic needs. May’s most provocative arguments come in the book’s final two chapters. One, devoted to the Civil War, shows how the failure of planters to provide even the smallest “gifts” during Christmastime made enslaved people even “more resentful of their bondage” (178), strengthening their resolve to slow down, escape, or otherwise undermine the plantation economy. Knowing the pride southerners took in their Christmas traditions, Union soldiers occasionally burned down cities during the holiday season. And far from a moment of reprieve, wartime Christmases were times of high anxiety. Planters so feared slave revolts that Confederate generals diverted war materiel to cities where revolts were rumored, contributing, May argues, to Confederate battlefield defeats. The final chapter, on Christmastime stories published after the war, takes its inspiration from David Blight’s now-classic study of Civil War memory, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001). After the war, May shows that white southerners and northerners published untold numbers of romanticized...

Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory by Robert E. May

Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory by Robert E. May

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Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory

Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory

The Nickel: A History of African-Descended People in Houston’s Fifth Ward

This paper will chronicle the unique stories that have come to exemplify the larger experience of Fifth Ward as a historically African American district in a rapidly changing city, Houston. Fifth Ward is a district submerged in the Southern memory of a sprawling port city. Its 19th century inception comprised of residents from Eastern Europe, Russia, and other religious groups who were fleeing persecution. Another way to describe Fifth Ward is much closer to the Fifth Ward that I knew as a child—an African American Fifth Ward and, more personally, my grandparents’ neighborhood. The growing prosperity of an early 20th century oil-booming Houston had soon turned the neighborhood into an economic haven, attracting African Americans from rural Louisiana and east Texas. Within the past two decades, Latino communities have populated the area, transforming the previously majority African American ward. Through a qualitative familial research review of historic documents, this paper contains a cultural and economic analysis that will illustrate the unique legacies and challenges of its past and present residents. I will center my personal genealogical roots to connect with larger patterns of change over time for African Americans in this distinct cultural ward.

Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory by Robert E. May

Reviewed by: Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory by Robert E. May Ashley Whitehead Luskey Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory. By Robert E. May. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Pp. xviii, 332. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8139-4214-8.) Robert E. May seeks to dispel lingering misconceptions and misrepresentations of Christmastime under slavery. Such misrepresentations date back to the antebellum era itself and were fostered by white southerners and Confederate defenders, as well as by scholars such as U. B. Phillips, to justify the moral righteousness and legitimacy of the peculiar institution. May has deployed an impressive depth and breadth of research into the letters, diaries, and records of plantation owners, northern travel writers' observations of life in the South, newspaper accounts, literary and visual culture, and slave narratives and post-bellum interviews with the formerly enslaved, as well as modern-day plantation tourism literature, marketing campaigns, and historic site interpretation. In so doing, he complicates age-old narratives glorifying slave Christmases as blissful times of relaxation, dancing, freedom to travel and visit with family, affectionate gift-giving from benevolent masters, and indulgent feasting with owners and their families, entirely devoid of whippings or traffic in human flesh. Such inaccurate narratives, May argues, have for too long dominated and, indeed, distorted public memory about the realities and legacies of slavery in America. While May stresses that such unblemished holiday happiness was hardly commonplace for slaves, he does find some evidence of all of these Christmastime practices within slaveholding communities. He notes that great variance existed in how white and black southerners from different families and regions, and over different periods of time, celebrated this much-anticipated season. May reminds readers that, even in instances when slaves were granted two weeks off at Christmastime to visit family, were included in their masters' eggnog toasts, or received ample gifts of clothing, food, or holiday treats from [End Page 911] their white owners, such practices were usually crafted performances or calculated indulgences by masters and mistresses that were meant to placate their human chattel and reaffirm slaves' submissiveness and loyalty to white authority. May's findings buttress Eugene D. Genovese's argument that it was this uniquely reciprocal system of paternalism that undergirded the peculiar institution. However, like Genovese (as well as scholars such as Kenneth M. Stampp, Walter Johnson, and Edward E. Baptist), May also stresses that the violence, whippings, vigilante patrols, and buying and selling of people that also were omnipresent aspects of slavery ceased to take a holiday, even during the Christmas season. Indeed, May notes that slaveholders deemed such practices essential, as they lived in constant fear of slave revolts and rebellions every Christmas when, they dreaded, slaves might use their extra time off (and additional rations of alcohol) to "make the night hideous" for their owners. Yet May ultimately departs from Baptist and others who stress the wholly oppressive nature of the peculiar institution. May is at his best when unpacking the complex power dynamics involved in rituals such as the game of "Christmas Gif" and the "John Canoe" dance in which slaves exercised agency in making demands of their owners in return for their submissiveness or by acting in rebellion against total cultural assimilation by asserting pride in their native African culture through traditional song and dance. These practices, combined with the pressure that they often placed on masters to afford slaves certain indulgences at Christmastime, again confirm the former arguments of Genovese and Johnson regarding the remarkable agency of enslaved individuals. Despite these strengths, the structure of May's work may confuse readers. Several chapters propose to debunk the mythologized components of slave Christmases only to conclude that such components were not wholly mythologized and played an important—though admittedly varied—role in slaves' Christmas celebrations. In a few instances, May somewhat overstates his case about the centrality of Christmas rituals to the upholding of the peculiar institution, such as when he implies that a decrease in masters' ability to perpetuate paternalistic rituals at Christmastime throughout the Civil War had a notable impact on slaves' decisions to self-emancipate and on the downfall of the Confederacy itself. Moreover, by...

Rooted: Black Women, Southern Memory, and Womanist Cartographies

This essay explores the connections between Black southern women and the voiced memory of southern landscapes. The author uses her own lived experiences in what she calls “Afro-Carolina,” along with the voices of other Black southern women, to reveal a multi-vocal counter-cartography. Personal reflection, oral history excerpts, a “runaway slave” advertisement, and descriptions of land through a womanist lens all weave together to demonstrate a modality the author names “Womanist Cartography.” Using the tools of memoir, folklore, and experimental prose, the author invites readers to re-engage the notions of southern land through the lives, dreams, and minds of Black women. The inclusion of multi-modal artist Allison Janae Hamilton’s photography further amplifies these counter-cartographic concepts. In the wake of contemporary cataclysms around southern monuments and place-making, based on traditional hegemonies, this essay presents alternative narratives for what and where is deemed sacred in the American South, and by whom.

Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory by Robert E. May

Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory by Robert E. May

Apostle of the Lost Cause: J. William Jones, Baptists, and the Development of Confederate Memory by Christopher C. Moore

Reviewed by: Apostle of the Lost Cause: J. William Jones, Baptists, and the Development of Confederate Memory by Christopher C. Moore Paul Yandle Apostle of the Lost Cause: J. William Jones, Baptists, and the Development of Confederate Memory. By Christopher C. Moore. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2019. Pp. x, 300.) Christopher Moore’s work, published as part of the University of Tennessee Press’s series America’s Baptists, stands at an intersection of historiographies, informed by scholars of white southern memory including Fitzhugh Brundage and David Blight as well as historians of American religion and nineteenth-century culture such as Mark Noll and Beth Barton Schweiger. Part biography and part survey of J. William Jones’s parallel careers as Baptist clergyman and Lost Cause apologist, Apostle of the Lost Cause traces how Jones’s roles developed in tandem, beginning with his days as a student at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in the late 1850s. Jones’s original plan for his life—to serve as a missionary in Canton, China—was permanently interrupted by the Civil War. Ordained in the summer of 1860, he received his appointment to Canton and was scheduled to set sail that December. When South Carolina seceded from the Union, however, Jones’s mission board delayed his departure, and he took a temporary appointment at a Baptist church in his home county in Virginia. When that state decided to leave the Union, Jones became first a Confederate chaplain and later an army evangelist, a role that tied his financial support directly to Southern Baptists. Destined to stay in the United States, Jones became pastor in 1866 of a Baptist church in Lexington, Virginia, the town where Robert E. Lee settled after accepting the presidency of Washington College (now Washington and Lee University). Working as one of the clergy who served on rotation as chaplain at the school, Jones got to know Lee and his family. His acquaintance with the Lees led him to his alternate career as a Lost Causer, which began with his publication of a biography of Lee after Lee’s death in 1870. For the remainder of the nineteenth century and well into the first decade of the twentieth, Moore pursued his twin careers with vigor, his peripatetic life in the Southern Baptist Convention interspersed with his publication of defenses of the Lost Cause. Beyond his own publications, Jones’s work with [End Page 55] the pro-Confederate Southern Historical Society, which included a full-time position for a few years after Reconstruction, marked his determination to build a foundation of sanitized and vetted information upon which he hoped future historians would rely. Early in his work, Moore reveals his two primary goals for his study of Jones. One is to present Jones’s work as a Southern Baptist as a challenge to the scholarly argument that the popularity of Lost Cause literature reflected a muting of doctrinal differences among southern white Protestants that began during the Civil War and continued afterwards. A second is to reveal how Jones spanned the transition between two often-cited Lost Cause iterations discussed by Thomas Connelly and Barbara Bellows. The first, “Inner Lost Cause,” common in the years immediately after the war, largely involved a spirited proclamation of the superiority of the Confederate Army and its leadership over its northern counterparts. The second, “National Lost Cause,” centered on the construction of a historical narrative that would, Jones and others hoped, allow younger generations to participate in the larger life of the United States while remaining unapologetically true in heart to the Confederacy. Moore concludes from examining Jones that scholars have overestimated the degree to which Protestant denominations merged efforts toward promoting the Lost Cause in the second half of the nineteenth century. As a Southern Baptist confronted daily with the immediacy of death during the war, Jones, like most of his Protestant colleagues, was able to found common ground with other Protestant denominations, trading preaching duties and, if they so desired, referring newly converted soldiers to chaplains of other denominations amid the periods of revival that took place in the army camps in which he served. Moore argues, however, that Jones remained a champion of Baptists...

Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory

Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory

Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory

Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory

Andrew Denson. Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory.

Andrew Denson. Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory.

Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory by Andrew Denson

Reviewed by: Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory by Andrew Denson Denise E. Bates Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory. By Andrew Denson. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. xiv, 289. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-3083-0; cloth, $85.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-3082-3.) In Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory, Andrew Denson makes a significant and timely contribution to a growing body of scholarship on the Native South. With a carefully constructed argument, he demonstrates that "memorializing Cherokee removal is a southern tradition" that has its roots in the early twentieth century and has been manifested in the creation of memorials, the designation of historic sites, and the establishment of tourist attractions spanning at least seven states and continuing into the present (p. 3). Public memory surrounding the forcible removal of thousands of Cherokees from their southeastern homeland in the 1830s, popularly referred to as the Trail of Tears, offers a lens through which to better examine the roles of race and identity in heritage work and memory construction. One of the prevailing themes of this book is the complex manner in which Cherokee removal entered the collective memory of white southerners. Denson argues that for "non-Indians," remembering removal served an emotional and political need that helped them "fulfill their obligation to recognize injustice and trauma in the nation's past" (p. 11). However, "the memory remained politically innocuous" given both its historical distance and its predication on the belief that Indians vanished from the region and ceased to have claims to the land(p. 11). The continued presence of Cherokees in places like western North Carolina did little to challenge these beliefs, as they were deemed an anomaly and even became an asset in bolstering tourism. The civil rights era saw a surge in Cherokee removal commemorations "as the acknowledgment of Native American dispossession granted some white southerners a politically safe way to consider their region's heritage of racial oppression" while continuing to deny the violence and injustice toward African Americans, whose history had been largely excluded from heritage projects (pp. 112–13). Removal memorials, Denson argues, reinforced white authority in defining the South. Denson describes how commemoration is a form of "place making,""an act of possession" where meaning is assigned, values are imposed, and interpretations are always shifting (p. 12). Cherokee removal commemoration efforts have largely been carried out by white southerners who claimed personal connections to Cherokee history and historic sites, seeing them as part of their own community's heritage and, therefore, as infused with meaning that was significant to their own history. Denson offers one example, the memorialization of the grave site of Nancy Ward, a Cherokee "'Beloved Woman'" who is recognized as a significant character in Tennessee's colonial history (p. 91). As a result, Denson argues, the "commemoration emphasized Ward's significance to Tennessee and the United States, while all but erasing her Cherokee [End Page 438] identity" (p. 91). One of the book's biggest strengths is its attention to how Cherokee people interacted with, benefited from, and were sometimes at odds with "heritage tourism" (p. 10). While removal commemorations sprang up across the Southeast, Denson states, "Cherokees proved capable of repossessing this history and applying it to their own purposes" (p. 10). Members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina, the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, and other Cherokee communities scattered throughout the Southeast used removal memory to assert and shape their identities during critical shifts in U.S. Indian policy. Monuments to Absence is an important book that draws from an impressive array of sources to offer a series of cases that span the region. It tells a multidimensional story that makes a significant contribution to several areas of scholarship. Most notably, it directly engages with modern discourse on public memory and reminds historians and heritage workers of the power they wield and the responsibilities they have in how they put "history to work in the present" (p. 17). Denise E. Bates Arizona State University Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association...

Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory by Andrew Denson

Reviewed by: Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory by Andrew Denson Christina Snyder (bio) Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory. By Andrew Denson. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. 304. Cloth, $85.00; paper, $29.95.) Cherokee removal is perhaps the most well known episode in Native American history. In Monuments to Absence, Andrew Denson explores how and why this came to be by exploring public commemorations of Cherokee removal, focusing on the American South and Oklahoma from the 1920s to the present. This multivalent study highlights a diverse range of white and Indian heritage workers, business professionals, politicians, and activists. Other scholars of memory have pointed out that “white heritage workers in the South generally excluded the histories of people of color from public commemoration until after the civil rights movement” (2). Denson, however, demonstrates that white southerners zealously commemorated removal beginning in the 1920s and continue to do so now. The reasons why have shifted over time, but heritage workers and the general public agreed on one basic premise: removal was a tragic injustice. Cherokees engaged in public commemorations for their own reasons and, as Denson argues, seized on whites’ critical view of removal to cultivate political and economic change in subsequent periods. White commemorations of removal began in southern Appalachia in the 1920s. Buoyed by the rise of the automobile and the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, tourism boosters highlighted the culture and history of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. This group had managed to evade removal and still lived in western North Carolina. In some ways, boosters described the Eastern Band and white Appalachia similarly: as “colorful primitives” whose supposedly premodern cultures offered a respite from industrialized America (7). But boosters also touted the Cherokee story as exceptional owing to their status as the most “civilized tribe” and their tremendous suffering during removal. Acknowledging such [End Page 167] injustice complicated public commemorations like Chattanooga’s 1938 Chickamauga National Celebration. Marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Chickamauga and the one hundredth anniversary of the Trail of Tears, Chattanooga’s civic leaders linked the memory of removal and the Lost Cause (the historian John P. Brown, for example, described the anticolonial Cherokee chief Dragging Canoe as “Tennessee’s first secessionist” [98]), while denying African Americans a role in the celebration. Such commemorations drew on Cherokee history, but they also distorted it to heighten dramatic effect and to please predominantly white audiences. While problematic, white commemorations of removal also opened a path to Eastern Band Cherokees seeking to retain their separate, sovereign status during Jim Crow. The 1950s and 1960s brought a new wave of commemorations. In Georgia, the state government restored—and reimagined—the old Cherokee capital, New Echota, while businessmen and politicians in southern Appalachia championed the hugely successful outdoor drama centered on removal, Unto These Hills. Denson explains that as white southern elites confronted the civil rights movement, they embraced the memory of removal while continuing to shun African American perspectives and experiences. This may seem like a paradox, but it made sense to white leaders seeking a “politically safe way to consider their region’s heritage of racial oppression” without discussing slavery or Jim Crow (9). Their rationale gets to the heart of Denson’s title; whites framed removal as the tragic end of Native history in the South. Monuments to absent peoples were politically cheap, allowing southern elites to claim moral authority in crafting a narrative of progress. Commemorations often included Eastern Band Cherokees who were very much alive, but the dominant removal narrative cast them as a notable exception, ignoring the many other Native peoples who remained in the region. Eastern Band Cherokees found jobs in heritage work and, more important, leveraged their visibility to ward off the federal government’s termination policy, which sought to extinguish tribal sovereignty. The Oklahoma Cherokees, subject to an earlier policy that terminated their sovereign status and allotted their landholdings, also launched public history projects during this period. In his most fascinating chapter, Denson explores how a diverse Oklahoma Cherokee populace debated how best to deal with...

Struggles Over Memory: Indigenous People and Commemorative Culture

Struggles Over Memory:Indigenous People and Commemorative Culture Lisa Blee (bio) David W. Grua. Surviving Wounded Knee: The Lakotas and the Politics of Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. ix + 276 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95. Andrew Denson. Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest Over Southern Memory. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. xii + 289 pp. Halftones, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. Once the purview of southern scholars, historical studies in American memory have recently turned to regions beyond the South, relations beyond the black-white binary, and stubborn myths beyond the Lost Cause. Tiya Miles's research on African American and Cherokee relations (The House on Diamond Hill, 2010) shows us that memory is a complicated force that can articulate and shape identity; it reveals structures of power and the unstable meanings of family, race, and place. In addition to Miles's study, there has been growth in the fertile ground of Indigenous memory studies. Jean O'Brien's Firsting and Lasting (2010) and Christine DeLucia's Memory Lands (2018) argue that memories of colonial violence and settlement in New England continue to shape perceptions of dispossession and Indigenous persistence in the region. Ari Kelman's A Misplaced Massacre (2015) and a handful of others turned westward to contend with memorials of violent events that Americans lamented as the price of progress. Other recent scholars consider the fraught capitalist realm of heritage tourism, noting how the marketplace of memory can be a double-edged sword for Indigenous people. Emerging within this vibrant scholarly field, David W. Grua and Andrew Denson likewise focus on the fraught process of memory-making while centering Indigenous peoples' perspectives. Their unique studies advance new insights about the politics of memory in which Indigenous people have long been active participants, while also modeling different approaches to evidence, scope, and framing in their respective books. [End Page 597] Grua's Surviving Wounded Knee and Denson's Monuments to Absence set their studies in distinct regions of the United States: the Northern Plains and the South, respectively. They each engage with the memory of a violent event. They read Lakotas' and Cherokees' engagement with non-Indian memorial practices in the specific context of each tribal nation and federal Indian policy shift. They consider Indigenous history as constitutive of the American settler state, and their respective battles over the meaning of the past as fundamental struggles over the memory of the nation. Grua limits his study to the surviving generation who held the event in living memory, while Denson focuses on commemorative practices that began nearly a century afterward. These books not only provide excellent summaries of the events in question; the authors' distinct choices about how to frame and structure their analyses of what happens in the aftermath of colonial violence also raise productive questions over the definition and stakes of memory studies. On December 29, 1890, the U.S. Seventh Cavalry engaged members of Minneconjou Lakota Chief Big Foot's band in a violent altercation. Jumpy and suspicious that the group of Ghost Dancers camped at Wounded Knee creek intended to attack them, the soldiers attempted to disarm and then fired upon the Lakota men, women, and children who fled for their lives. Almost immediately afterward, survivors insisted that the Seventh Cavalry had murdered innocent people. The survivors' quest for justice was personal, but also holds national significance. Wounded Knee is commonly understood to mark the moment when armed American Indian resistance ended and the United States secured military dominion over their lands. For Grua, this "history of ways that Wounded Knee has been remembered, contested, and reimagined during the five decades after 1890" is paramount to understanding national memory and the origins of American power borne of violence. Surviving Wounded Knee is composed of seven mainly chronological chapters and divided into two parts: "Official Memory" and "Lakota Countermemory." The neat organization refers mainly to written text and can be a bit misleading, for it belies the complex ways in which historical narratives are constructed in various forms. Indeed, as Grua demonstrates, Lakota survivors and non-Indian critics did raise challenges to the version that became the official...

Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory by Andrew Denson

Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory by Andrew Denson