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  • Mythic Frontiers: Remembering, Forgetting, and Profiting with Cultural Heritage Tourism by Daniel R. Maher
  • A. Dana Weber
Mythic Frontiers: Remembering, Forgetting, and Profiting with Cultural Heritage Tourism. By Daniel R. Maher. (Gainesville: university Press of Florida, 2016. Pp. xiii + 294, figures, foreword, acknowledgments, notes, bibliography, index.)

"The primary narrative of the frontier complex minimizes the devastating consequences that imperialism, racism, and sexism have had on social minorities in the past and still today as it elevates and legitimizes the privilege bestowed to white men past and present" (p. 5). This is the core thesis of Daniel R. Maher's Mythic Frontiers. The book examines the purportedly accurate educational claims of frontier heritage tourism sites and uncovers that, rather than historical facts, they promote the ideological components listed in the quote.

A case study of Fort Smith, Arkansas (founded in 1817), Maher's book interprets the sites that constitute the fort in view of the mechanisms by which they create selective white hegemonic and sexist narratives. The author weaves each analysis around a historical figure [End Page 480] connected to the fort, from "Hanging Judge" Isaac C. Parker and the African American lawman Deputy US Marshal Mass Reeves to Laura Zeigler, the madam of a bordello, and Belle Starr (Myra Maybelle Shirley), a female horse thief. This personalization renders Maher's dense historical interpretations relatable and facilitates readers' engagement with each issue he addresses. To debunk the claims made by ideological narratives, Maher not only provides an impressive array of meticulously researched historical sources that he interprets incisively, but he also relies on fieldwork that allows him to flesh out his argument with experiential insights about the investigated localities' current operations. Maher's field expertise includes his tenure as Director of Fort Smith's Multicultural Center and his involvement in community service at the same site. This in-depth engagement with the research location explains at least in part his access to historical sources and his sophistication in analyzing them.

In the first two chapters, Maher introduces readers to the sites, their history, and the concepts that guide his analysis. These concepts are the "frontier complex"; its complement, the "frontier in the attic"; and the notion of "cultural heritage." By the "complex," Maher refers to the "simplified, overarching narrative history of the nation that selectively remembers and portrays some details as it conveniently forgets others" (p. 4). The phrase "frontier in the attic" paraphrases Confederates in the Attic (Pantheon, 1998), the title of Tony Horwitz's seminal journalistic foray into the world of American Civil War reenactments, an indispensable source for any analysis of how live performances aim to reconstruct historical lifeworlds. Maher adapts it to the frontier where, unlike the still unresolved and more obviously racially charged Civil War, "white Anglo men definitively won claims to property and power as each frontier space was bent to the will of manifest destiny" (p. 3). In his use, today's "frontier in the attic" refers to the "mental and physical spaces" in which (usually white) Americans act out frustrations and "felt grievances" by relinquishing them to the past. Paradoxically, bringing them to life in historical roleplay aims to alleviate them in the present. Maher notes that the "cultural heritage" of Fort Smith consists of "ostensibly authentic reproductions" of the thus-understood "frontier complex" and the "frontier in the attic" in the "spoken, visual, and textual interpretations" of its tourist sites, museums, and their practices (p. 4). They reinvent the past in line with "contemporary ideologies of power, class, gender, and race" (pp. 4–5) and thus offer "potent formula[s] for identity formation" (p. 23). Maher identifies five major eras during which the frontier complex evolved, from the controlled US encroachment into Native American territories by way of forts in the early 1800s to the transformation of these locations into tourist attractions at the end of the nineteenth century. He then traces how the forts adapted ideologically to subsequent political regimes and fluctuating economic needs. Today's frontier complex, Maher argues, continues Fort Smith's "tourismification" that started after World War II and during the Cold War, when the United States represented itself as a world power by way of...

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