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Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory

Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory

by Brundage (Author), W. Fitzhugh (Author)

  • New

    Illustrated 2008

    $33.89
Synopsis

Since the Civil War, whites and blacks have struggled over the meanings and uses of the Southern past. Indeed, today's controversies over flying the Confederate flag, renaming schools and streets, and commemorating the Civil War and the civil rights movement are only the latest examples of this ongoing divisive contest over issues of regional identity and heritage. The Southern Past argues that these battles are ultimately about who has the power to determine what we remember of the past, and whether that remembrance will honor all Southerners or only select groups.

$33.89

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More Information

Format: Illustrated
 Pages: 432
 Edition: Illustrated
 Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 06 May 2008
ISBN 10: 0674027213
ISBN 13: 9780674027213
Book Overview: Fitzhugh Brundage's The Southern Past is an extraordinarily ambitious and important book, a true achievement by an immensely talented historian. This book should reach a wide audience with its story of how the past has been shaped and reshaped in the South through usable narratives, commodities, curriculums, parades, books, sacred sites, vacant lots, real politics, and heroic icons on both sides of a tragic racial divide. In scope, research, and writerly execution, no one has ever captured the scars and the possibilities of Southern memory quite like this. -- David W. Blight, author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory History is a powerful weapon. In this stunningly imaginative and finely crafted study of the struggle for the control of the memory of the Southern past, W. Fitzhugh Brundage has provided a critical lens through which we can view some of the most volatile issues of our time. In stark detail, he explains how Southern white memories of gentility and the heroic Confederacy co-existed with, and were finally challenged by, Southern black memories of human bondage and heroic slave resistance. In a most sophisticated analysis Brundage explains how shifting political power has constructed and reconstructed the remembered history of a changing Southern cultural landscape. This is history at its best in service of our society's efforts to come to terms with notions of Southern heritage, one of the most complex, controversial, and significant issues of our time. -- James Oliver Horton, co-author of Slavery and the Making of America

Media Reviews
[Brundage's] close analysis brilliantly reveals how Southerners defined themselves - and who did the defining... White Southerners - acting from positions of power - saw the sites of their memories lovingly restored; black Southerners saw theirs demolished. But with the end of segregation, whites and blacks confronted one another on far more equal ground in battles over the placement of the Confederate battle flag and the singing of 'Dixie.' - Ira Berlin, Washington Post Book World
Author Bio
W. Fitzhugh Brundage is the William B. Umstead Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.