| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Sustaining Identity, Recapturing Heritage: Exploring Issues of Public History, Tourism, and Race in a Southern Town. By Ann Denkler. (Lanham: Lexington, 2007. vi, 131 pp. $55.00, ISBN 978-0-7391-1991-4.)
Sustaining Identity, Recapturing Heritage investigates how and why the people of Luray, Virginia, have remembered and portrayed their community's past via public history sites. Ann Denkler means for the book to be read as a "critical ethnographic work, or, ethnography that asks critical questions of informants to create social change" (p. 7); it is not a historical monograph, though the author intends to spark debate on the practices of historical inquiry and interpretation. She argues, "Our very quality of life is affected by how we see—or do not see—ourselves in history and in the public history around us" (p. 9).	1
Luray, the seat of Page County in the Shenandoah Valley, has throughout its recorded history been multiethnic, yet Denkler contends that the presence of Native Americans and African Americans has been all but completely ignored—whitewashed—by the town's expressions of public history and its heritage tourism industry. She finds ample evidence in Luray's officially sanctioned public history monuments and markers, and historic homes and sites, that for those who control the community's official public memory, "White history is worth remembering and celebrating and African American history is not" (p. 26).	. . .

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