Public Memory

Memory in Black and White: Race, Commemoration, and the Post-Bellum Landscape. By Paul A. Shackel. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press, 2003. xvii + 250 pp. Photos, bibliography, and index. $70.00 (cloth); $26.95 (paper).

Southern Heritage on Display: Public Ritual and Ethnic Diversity within Southern Regionalism. Edited by Celeste Ray. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2003. viii + 301 pp. Maps, photos, notes, bibliography, glossary, and index. $49.95.

Phoebe S. Kropp
University of Pennsylvania

The study of public memory has continued to grow in recent years, as has attention to the question of how memory informs race relations and ethnic identity. These two recent contributions to the field together enhance our understanding of how different pasts have come to play key roles in constructing Southern and Civil War heritage. Each work engages a different theoretical question about memory. Paul Shackel, in Memory in Black and White, interrogates the relationship between material culture and public memories—how do extant artifacts enable and constrain the stories one can tell about the past? This is a key question for those seeking memories more inclusive of African Americans or others who have left fewer records and relics scholars are bound to respect. The authors collected in Celeste Ray's anthology, Southern Heritage on Display, all take aim at a broad inquiry: how does the past influence group identity formation? Whether the group be "nostalgic Confederates," Blacks in New Orleans, Mexican immigrants in Florida, or Tuscarora Indians in North Carolina, their chroniclers show how these groups use variants of a Southern past to build a sense of shared history and identity. That both pose such intriguing questions perhaps better than they answer them seems less a problem than a conscious choice to eschew theoretical debates in favor of more concrete conclusions— on Shackel's part to concentrate on usable lessons for public history practitioners, and on the part of some authors in Southern Heritage, to focus on documenting a dizzying array of southern "ethnic" groups.