Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity.

Edited by W. Fitzhugh Brundage. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2000. Pp. [xiv], 366. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-4886-7; cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2572-7.)

Everyone interested in historical memory or southern identity should read Where These Memories Grow. It begins with editor W. Fitzhugh Brundage's extremely helpful discussion of the nature and function of historical memory. Each of the twelve essays that follow, ten of them published for the first time, explores an instance of historical memory in the South. The great strength of the collection lies in the quality of most of the essays and the diversity of their subjects. Only three of them focus specifically on white collective memory. Anne Sarah Rubin's essay demonstrates how Confederates employed the memory of the American Revolution to create a new national identity--and to avoid talking about slavery. Catherine W. Bishir astutely analyzes how memorial and architectural styles supported white supremacy in North Carolina at the turn of the twentieth century. And Stephanie E. Yuhl shows how, in the 1920s, three prominent Charleston women shaped that city's vision of its history into "a socially regressive culture of nostalgia" resting on "a particular, memory-based, white female aesthetic" (p. 243).

Four essays examine memory within the African American community. Gregg D. Kimball's essay argues that blacks in antebellum Virginia employed memory to create a complex identity as Africans, Americans, and Virginians. Kathleen Clark describes how in Emancipation Day celebrations during Reconstruction blacks "promote[d] their own interpretations Of history ... that variously stressed both the memory of slavery and the evolution of black progress" (p. 125). Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp finds a "thoroughly Protestant and thoroughly African American" historical consciousness (p. 184) in the post-Reconstruction writings of a group of African American historians. Investigating not only the black but white community in present-day Laurens County, South Carolina, Bruce E. Baker explores patterns in the remembering and forgetting of lynchings.

The other essays focus on distinct groups within the South. Michele Gillespie demonstrates that Georgia artisans employed accounts of their role in the Revolution to enhance their influence in the early national period. John Howard tells of a 1895 murder in Mississippi that followed veiled accusations of homosexuality and then speculates about how the community did and did not talk about it. Brundage traces the twentieth-century revival of an Acadian identity, one based in a sense of "victimhood" (p. 285) and the defense of tradition but still used to boost tourism. Also looking at developments in the twentieth century, C. Brenden Martin shows how outsiders and native entrepreneurs, both motivated by its potential commercial appeal to tourists, constructed a new Appalachian identity centered on the mountaineer. Holly Beachley Brear's essay explores what the control of the Alamo exercised by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas reveals about conceptions of both history and gender.

Despite the diversity in subject matter, the essays have much in common. With the exceptions of Martin's delightfully irreverent essay and, to a lesser extent, Brundage's, the authors grant deep social authenticity to collective memory. They believe, and demonstrate, that memories reveal much about a society and power relations within it. The essays give far less attention to a second function of historical memory, one mentioned by Brundage in the introduction: its power to shape collective and individual behavior. Finally, the authors apparently share a conviction that historical memories are particularly important to southern identity. The very diversity of memories discussed in the volume, however, challenges the traditional view of a southern identity based on a special sense of the past. It suggests that memories do not grow in the South because the past is more important to southerners than to others, but rather that the region is a hothouse of history because there are so many divisions within it and so little agreement on its identity.

GAINES M. FOSTER
Louisiana State University