ABSTRACT
This chapter traces contests over historical memory in the American South from the mid-nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. Although the American South was riven by marked regional, racial, economic and political divisions throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, white elites laboured tirelessly to promote the perception of a South united by a cohesive regional culture. But this façade of a cohesive regional culture required ongoing struggle among southerners to determine who exercised the power to make some historical narratives possible and to silence others. Although white southerners were successful in building a regional commemorative landscape that honoured their preferred version of the past, alternative traditions of memory, especially among African Americans, endured. Only in recent years, Fitz Brundage argues, have southerners begun to fashion a pluralist public culture in which both black and white historical memory are acknowledged.
