Book Review

Whenever "history," "memory," or "identity" is mentioned, the South will usually be in the vicinity. Indeed, one way to understand southern intellectual history since the 1920s is as the conflict between disciplinary historians and "communities of memories" for the control of southern identity. But if the essays collected in W. Fitzhugh Brundage's volume are any measure, the correct term should be southern "identities." Classes and masses, whites and blacks, men and women, Anglos and Hispanics, gays and straights, mountaineers, Cajuns, and Native Americans: each and all have struggled to control how their groups will be defined. The upshot is, of course, an inextricable link between memory and politics. As David Blight notes in the epilogue: "those who can create the dominant historical narrative, those who can own the public memory, will achieve political and cultural power."

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Memory and tradition have been intimately related to commercial development as well. Whether as cause or effect or both, the memory industry has often paid off handsomely. Whether it was the Cajuns in Louisiana as analyzed by Brundage or the mountaineers and Cherokees in the Great Smokies as discussed by C. Brenden Martin, the recovery of the "authentic" has usually been accompanied, even motivated, by the desire to attract tourists, tourism being one of the main engines of southern economic development since 1945. Where folk cultures were, there theme parks will be.

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