Contentious and Collected: Memory's Future in Southern History

THE SOUTH IS A PROMINENT SITE OF WHAT KERWIN LEE KLEIN describes as the industry. (1) Journalists and scholars alike have shown keen interest in tracing the origins and effects of both recent and bygone controversies over the region' s past. Indeed, only France seems to rival the American South as a field for scholars of memory. Against the backdrops of ongoing contests over the meaning of the southern past in public life and of an ever-expanding academic literature on memory, it is appropriate to pause and reflect on questions and topics that the contemporary interest in has left unaddressed. For all the work to date on southern memory, it is striking how much remains to be done. (2) Scholars, of course, were writing thoughtfully about how communities recalled and used the past long before the phrase historical memory became ubiquitous in article and book titles. During the 1950s and 1960s especially, scholars drew on theories of myth then influential in anthropology, as well as the interest in symbols in literary and American studies. An enduring exemplar of this approach is William R. Taylor's Cavalier and Yankee, a book that continues to reward close reading now almost five decades after its first publication. But while this early scholarship shed light on the origins of various cultural archetypes, it had comparatively little to say about the replication of these cultural tropes. (3) Recent scholarship on southern draws on different theoretical sources and is much more wide ranging in its topical coverage. (4) The shift from the history of myth to the history of collective has been an extension of the shift from the history of ideas to the history of meaning that William J. Bouwsma anticipated almost three decades ago. (5) As part of a larger blurring of disciplinary boundaries between intellectual and cultural history and other subfields of history, the current approach to melds semiotics, material culture, and social, cultural, and political history. The overarching ambition of scholars has been to explicate how meaning has been assigned through discourse, with due attention paid to forms of both elite and popular cultural expression (ranging from images and ritual to material culture). Skepticism about this promiscuous industry is understandable. The capaciousness of memory, which extends from acts of self-reflection and family lore to ritualized commemorative observances, poses daunting research and interpretative challenges. On the practical level, scholars of must impose intellectually justifiable boundaries on their research and topical coverage. Historical memory, as much as any topic of analysis, defies simple periodization. Many scholars who have written on the of the Civil War, for example, have elected to end their studies at 1915, the fiftieth anniversary of Appomattox. Practical considerations may justify terminating these works in 1915, but that year is necessarily an arbitrary end point in any account of the commemoration of the war, which remained salient to public life and regional identity during subsequent decades. And without some hierarchy of significance, historians risk producing exhausting indexes that catalog the endless variety and particularities of memory. Scholars of also need to strive for precision in their description of and its practical effects, lest become little more than a synonym for ideology. Indeed, a few scholars have grumbled that collective is an inferior substitute for long-established concepts such as political tradition and myth. They warn that the overly elastic use of historical memory (both as term and concept) robs it of utility. Renewed analytical clarity and creativity may finally enable historians to explain with precision the relationship between personal and social memory. …