"The Real South Starts Here": Whiteness, the Confederacy, and Commodification at Stone Mountain

Stone Mountain, near Atlanta, Georgia, has served as a vital landscape for the construction of regional and racial identities in the South through the construction of a White identity based on the region's Confederate past. This paper examines Stone Mountain's historical development as a landscape of southern White identity construction, with particular focus on the roles played by "Lost Cause" interpretations of southern history, the Ku Klux Klan, and the state of Georgia during the Civil Rights movement. Since 1998, the partial privatization and development of Stone Mountain Park as a theme park based on an historical recreation of a late 19th-century southern town has altered the contexts and reproduction of these racial and regional identities. Stone Mountain, while retaining elements of the White southern identity rooted in the celebration of a Confederate past, has become primarily a place for the consumption of a commodified historical experience.