A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston.

A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston. By Stephanie E. Yuhl. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2005. Pp. xiv, 285. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5599-5; cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8078-2936-6.)

Stephanie E. Yuhl's new book, A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston, is "the story of how a group of elite white Charlestonians transformed these historical memories of loss and disintegration into a revitalized civic identity that rebuked the chaos of modern America and reasserted Charleston's relevance in national dialogues about race, politics, economics, and the social order," and it tells that story with impressive detail and analytical sophistication (pp. 1-2).

The various organizations and institutions Yuhl discusses are as tangled as the Spanish moss hanging from the live oaks in Charleston, with overlapping memberships and incestuous connections, creating an inward-looking city within a city in the years between the world wars. The first of these organizations to appear was the Society for the Preservation of Old Dwellings, and the study also takes in the Carolina Art Association, the Poetry Society of South Carolina, and the Society for the Preservation of Negro Spirituals. Dubose Heyward is the most famous of the people here, but Charleston's old families produced a number of individuals who combined artistic and organizational talents. Yuhl traces the various connections and also does an excellent job of showing how a multiplicity of cultural forms presented variations on a common theme. At a certain level of society in Charleston, one would have been bombarded from all sides with mutually reinforcing versions of the same story, the story of Charleston's 1850s golden age before war, destruction, and emancipation set the world off kilter. And yet, for all the inwardness of the place, Charlestonians showed a Yankee-like sharpness when it came to selling their city and its stories. The sad truth is that it was only northern money buying old houses, filling hotel rooms, and taking home trinkets that made it possible to create "Historic Charleston." Much more than in many books on the South and its culture, this book provides a real sense of Charleston's relationship with the rest of the nation.

For all that, the book perhaps could have done more to illuminate Charleston's relationship with the rest of South Carolina and the South. Yuhl does this in respect to literature, but it might have been instructive to see how the efforts of this Charleston elite compared and connected to the cultural work of others in the state such as Julia Peterkin, Genevieve Willcox Chandler, or Mary C. Simms Oliphant. Considering that Charlestonians Burnet Maybank and Ben Sawyer played such important roles in South Carolina politics during this period, not to mention James F. Byrnes on a national level, more attention to the political context of Historic Charleston might have helped demonstrate the concrete ways it affected the distribution and exercise of power "north of Broad Street."

Finally, while Yuhl argues that African Americans appear to have not concerned themselves with the historical fantasies that their elite white neighbors were busy constructing, one wishes she had found more opportunities to discuss their roles in and reaction to this construction of memory. The WPA collections at the South Caroliniana Library, for instance, contain some interviews that very deliberately construct an African American vision of Charleston's past. Nonetheless, Yuhl's study significantly deepens our understanding of how historical memory was both created and deployed in a southern city that provided a model for similar work across the region.

BRUCE E. BAKER

Royal Holloway, University of London