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Reviews
| Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South, by John C. Inscoe. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008. 412 pages. $50.00, cloth.
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| In his essay collection, Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South, John C. Inscoe once again proves himself to be an excellent writer and an outstanding scholar. Professor Inscoe, however, is also a man with a bone to pick, a bone to pick with authors of fiction, early twentieth-century propagandists for the region and its people, and—especially—his fellow southern historians. Too often, their portraits of Appalachia and its people have been simplistic, over-generalized, and smugly condescending. "Scholars of the rest of the South can—and usually do," he writes, "assess the larger region without acknowledging Appalachia" (p. 5). And, it is this failure that Inscoe addresses. |
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His book is divided into three sections: "Race," "War," and "Remembrance." The essays in the first two sections deal primarily with historical topics such as Frederick Law Olmsted's journey through the southern backcountry in 1853–1854 or the vicissitudes of elite mountain women during Major General George Stoneman's federal raid into western North Carolina in April 1865. However, those in the third section explore the slipperier issues of memory and representation. Whose memories are they and what motivations lay behind the representations of Appalachia and its people? |
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Often, Inscoe concludes that the lives and memories of Appalachia's people were sacrificed to a greater good by well-meaning outsiders. In the essay "A Northern Wedge Thrust into the Heart of the Confederacy: Explaining Civil War Loyalties in the Age of Appalachian Discovery, 1900–1921," for example, he points out that a small army of educators, social workers, missionaries, musicologists, and folklorists in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century undertook the presentation of mountain people to the nation. Stressing the pioneer simplicity of their lives, their racial purity, and their fidelity to the Union, the region's propagandists hoped to attract the attention of northern philanthropists. However, to do this, certain aspects of the past had to be ignored. Ironically, the most traumatic moment in the nation's history, the Civil War, was one of them. The particulars of how it was fought in the Appalachians and why it became an inconvenience did not lend itself to the image of the mountain people that their well-wishers hoped to convey. |
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In several of his other essays, Inscoe discusses a group even more determined to recast the history of the region and its people. "In the decades after the war's end," he writes, "largely elite groups of men and women throughout the former Confederacy shaped a very selective, subjective and politically useful version of the war for public memory" (p. 323). Advocates of what came to be called the "Lost Cause," along with their descendents, have sought to erase Unionism, dissent, and the horrors of guerrilla warfare from Appalachia's Civil War past. Nearly successful in their attempt to expunge the ambivalence and messiness of the years from 1861–1865, only the most recent generations of historians and others have challenged the dominant consensus myth. In a number of fictional works as well as in scholarly studies by historians like Martin Crawford, Phillip Paludan, and Inscoe, himself, they have tried to return an unvarnished past to its people. |
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Because of the author's fluid style and clarity of thought, Race, War, and Remembrance is suitable for students from advanced high school classes to graduate school. However, its cost probably limits use in secondary schools. Also, the variety of topics discussed would generally restrict secondary school teachers to assigning two or three chapters. But, for college and graduate students, the collection opens a window on aspects of southern history seldom investigated as well as the ways in which the past may be distorted for political, social, or ideological reasons. In the end, John C. Inscoe has presented the profession of history with a challenge. He dares us to looker harder, deeper, and at the margins. Who and what has been left out of our picture of the past? |
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| Eastern Illinois University |
Martin J. Hardeman |
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