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Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865-1915. By K. Stephen Prince. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Pp. 321. Cloth, $39.95; paper, $27.95.)
Historians and literary scholars have long been fascinated with narratives told about "the South." They have written extensively about stories conveyed by northerners and southerners, African Americans and whites, men and women, touching on familiar topics such as southern identity, tradition, race, and sense of place. K. Stephen Prince's Stories of the South continues in this tradition with the purpose of answering one question: "What is the South?" (1). More precisely, Prince is interested in what he calls the "cultural retreat from Reconstruction" (2), or the way in which novels, theatrical performances such as minstrelsy, newspaper and magazine articles, academic monographs, memoirs, pamphlets, travelogues, photographs, engravings, and cartoons both informed and sustained the nation's decision to abandon its political commitment to interracial democracy as embodied in such things as the Freedmen's Bureau, the Reconstruction Acts, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
Prince not only aims to expand the story of why northerners turned their back on the political aims of Reconstruction, but he also seeks to challenge the conventional historiography on sectional reconciliation written by David W. Blight, Nina Silber, Edward J. Blum, and Heather Cox Richardson. As he explains, "The reunion model flattens historical developments, implying that the post-Reconstruction era saw the reconnection of two static, unchanging regions" (9). He affiliates himself with recent books by myself and fellow...