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REVIEWS
| The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory. By W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. xiii plus 418 pp. $27.95).
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| As part of a more general fascination with the constructivism of historical knowledge and popular memory, Fitzhugh Brundage offers a glittering set of related essays that effectively bring the story told by David Blight's pace-setting Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001), which leaves off at the turn of the 20th century, up to the present moment. Concerned with the perpetually-racialized image of Southern history within the region's own civic culture, Brundage, author of previous major works on lynching and southern cooperative colonies, ranges imaginatively to collect a diverse treasure of popularly-sanctioned historical projects. The book's chapters encompass, in turn, southern white female historical societies of the 1890s; black festival days of the same era; establishment of (white) professional state archives after 1900; creation of Negro history societies and Negro History Week, circa 1910–1940; rise of (white) southern tourism industry, 1920–1940; post-World War II urban renewal and the destruction of historic black communities; and political battles over the by-now openly-contested markers of Southern history and identity since 1970. |
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Within a lively and very readable narrative frame, Brundage turns up delec- table morsels of insight at every turn. The lack of national (or even state-level) investment in memory-making, suggests Brundage, left U.S. "cultural policy" in the hands of local voluntary societies like the Oxford (Georgia) Women's Club or the Every Saturday History Class of Atlanta. Both the ideology of public service, derived from ante-bellum notions of "republican motherhood," and the non-controversial nature of women (as opposed to ex-soldiers) memorializing the Confederate dead, helps account for the rise of chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy at the turn of the century. The "traditions" such women guarded, however, were ambivalent when it came to women's public roles; while the cultivation of refined white status fueled patriarchal arguments for some commemoration activists, for others their demonstrated role as community reformers further justified a demand for suffrage. |
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