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  • Souvenirs of the Old South: Northern Tourism and Southern Mythology by Rebecca Cawood McIntyre
  • Mary Rizzo
Souvenirs of the Old South: Northern Tourism and Southern Mythology. By Rebecca Cawood McIntyre. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 2011.

From moonlit magnolias to quaint rural folk, the template for tourist images of the South has been narrowly construed, as shown by Rebecca Cawood McIntyre in Souvenirs of the Old South: Northern Tourism and Southern Mythology. What is the genealogy of these images? To answer this question, McIntyre delves into the history of southern tourism starting in the 1830s, when northern guidebook writers took advantage of better transportation to travel through the South and write about it for other northerners. In this way, McIntyre is interested in what might be called the touristic colonization of the South by the North. As she writes, “travel literature instructed tourists to see the region as a place where tourists could temporarily alleviate the problems and uncertainties of the modern world by stepping into a Dixie fantasyland of the past” (7).

Using sources including guidebooks and travelogues, McIntyre explores how the imagining of the South changed over time. Before the Civil War, tourist discourse ignored slavery in order to assert that the South was America writ small, except with amenities like hot springs (arguably better than the crowded ones in upstate New York) and picturesque landscapes. In the postbellum era, however, travel writers emphasized the South as different from the frenetic north. It was romantic, simpler, and, most disturbingly, peopled by rural whites and African Americans whose stereotypical depiction was meant to soothe anxious northerners whose own cities were [End Page 240] becoming more ethnically and racially diverse. While ascribing attitudes to people in the past is always fraught, McIntyre argues that, “by detecting which experiences are packaged with a particular image, it is possible to uncover the needs, desires, and anxieties of the tourist audience” (4). When focused on specific details, she meets this claim. For example, she shows how images exaggerated rustic decrepitude in order to sell a gothicized South by comparing an engraving of a moss-covered riverbank from Picturesque America (1872) with a photograph of the same place that shows it to be less alien. People are also subject to such framing. When taking a photograph of “Old Sam” for The Illustrated American (1890), journalist Julian Ralph noted that Sam suggested that he open his shirt to the waist, clearly to fit the expected image of a poor but happy African American. The political ramifications are underlined when Ralph writes, “the most touching and kindly, and even romantic, memories in our history are associated with the old relations of master and slave” (127).

As this suggests, tourist images can have negative real-world effects. McIntyre could have spent more time on representations of blacks and poor whites, contextualizing this work with other scholarship such as Doris Witt’s Black Hunger: Soul Food and America (2004) and Anthony Stanonis’s Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism, 1918–1945 (2006) that connect representation, race, power relations, and the South. Additional archival research on the handful of guidebook authors she cites might have fleshed out their thought process on how to package the South for an audience of northerners. Nonetheless, Souvenirs of the Old South is a valuable addition to the tourism literature and cultural histories of the South.

Mary Rizzo
Rutgers University–Camden
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