In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Southern Histories: Public, Personal, and Sacred
  • W. Fitzhugh Brundage
Southern Histories: Public, Personal, and Sacred. By David Goldfield (Athens, University of Georgia Press, 2003) 123 pp. $24.95

In Southern Histories, Goldfield ruminates about how the South's past is recalled and used by scholars and lay people, addressing the power of historical memory, the politics of regional identity, and the importance of public history. In the process, he offers a vigorous and eloquent defense of the historian's craft at a time when, and in a region where, ambiguity and nuance are seemingly anathema.

The book's longest chapter surveys contested histories of the South. In it, Goldfield reprises some of the arguments of his Still Fighting the Civil War (Baton Rouge, 2002), especially about the impact of the mythology of the "Lost Cause" on race relations and social justice throughout the region. He laments that whites revised the history of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction to exculpate their ancestors' failed experiment in nation-building. Although whites lavished sentiment and ink on such unlikely symbols of the Confederacy as Nathan Bedford Forrest, they ignored black counter-narratives and marginalized the rare white who displayed disloyalty to race or region. The result was a cultural milieu that precluded the creation of a pluralist, inclusive public [End Page 656] life, or of any historical consciousness shared by whites and blacks. Drawing upon his own experience as an author beset by neo-Confederates, Goldfield warns that the traditional white narrative has hardly withered in recent years. Only now is the South grappling with dissenting interpretations of its past. Goldfield acknowledges both the museums that address the African-American experience and the revisionist presentations of history in schools, historic sites, and public spaces. But he concludes much work remains to be done to lift the pall of intolerance.

Goldfield's caution reflects his wariness of the intolerance at the heart of the evangelical Protestantism that pervades the region. In the second chapter, Goldfield contends that southern evangelical Protestantism chafes at any separation of faith and civil society. In other words, just as the creed of the Lost Cause had to be the creed of all white Southerners, so too does evangelical Protestantism insist on being the faith of the region. Just as the United Daughters of the Confederacy sought to colonize public space with monuments, so too do Protestants want to fill southern civic spaces with religious symbols. To Goldfield, the time has come to quarantine evangelical Protestantism and promote progressive faiths that nurture tolerance.

Advocacy is an even more overt theme in the final chapter, which draws on Goldfield's experiences as a public historian. Having served as an expert witness for voting-rights litigation and in capital-punishment cases, in addition to contributing to an environmental and economic impact study of off-shore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, Goldfield is an advocate for the public engagement of historians. Goldfield's description of his jousting with prosecuting attorneys reveals the popular confusion about historians' methods and claims. Whether serving as a witness for the defense of an African-American in rural North Carolina or a Haitian in Orlando, Florida, Goldfield illuminates the historical "context" in which a defendant's actions occurred. Without resorting to any deep theory about historical method or elusive truth, Goldfield offers a compelling defense of engaged scholarship that informs public policy on behalf of social justice.

W. Fitzhugh Brundage
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
...

pdf

Share