Designing Dixie: Landscape, Tourism, and Memory in the New South, 1870--1917

Download or read book Designing Dixie: Landscape, Tourism, and Memory in the New South, 1870--1917 written by Reiko Margarita Hillyer and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation argues that northern tourism to southern cities in the post-Reconstruction period facilitated sectional reconciliation and helped to both foster and legitimate the economic transformation of the New South. It investigates how, in order to attract northern visitors and investors, architects, boosters, and preservationists in southern cities confronted, ignored, or revised their past and inscribed the result onto the New South landscape. St. Augustine's Spanish Renaissance Revival resorts muted the town's Confederate past and traced northern investment in the city to the tradition of imperial expansion. Richmond boasted its colonial and Revolutionary heritage, depicting its industrial development as an outgrowth of national destiny. Atlanta's use of northern architectural language displaced the southern identity of Atlanta and substituted a narrative of long-standing allegiance to a modern industrial order. Each of these cities fashioned a particular relationship to its southern, slaveholding, and Confederate past and put forward a history that assured Northerners of the region's stability and loyalty to industrial capitalism. In the process, northern and southern business elites reunited on the basis of economic development and the resubjugation of emancipated slaves. I also examine the activities of the Confederate Memorial Literary Society in Richmond, Virginia, and the creation of the Confederate Museum. Though the Society's efforts to preserve and valorize the Confederate past may seem to contradict the goals of the New South boosters, they ultimately reinforced the arguments of boosters in St. Augustine, Richmond, and Atlanta. By glorifying military sacrifice, the alleged benevolence of slavery, and a "solid" white South, the Museum's directors endorsed obedience to the social order of the New South. While contributing to the nascent literature on southern tourism, I challenge the prevailing assumption that reconciliation between Yankees and Confederates was based upon a nostalgic retreat from modernity, and instead, I place the sweeping changes of the New South economy at the center of an analysis of post-Civil War memory and culture. In so doing, I explore how New South boosters and their northern allies helped to promote economic development, rather than liberty or equality, as the legacy of the Civil War.