A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic CharlestonCharleston, South Carolina, today enjoys a reputation as a destination city for cultural and heritage tourism. In A Golden Haze of Memory, Stephanie E. Yuhl looks back to the crucial period between 1920 and 1940, when local leaders developed Charleston’s trademark image as “America’s Most Historic City.” Eager to assert the national value of their regional cultural traditions and to situate Charleston as a bulwark against the chaos of modern America, these descendants of old-line families downplayed Confederate associations and emphasized the city’s colonial and early national prominence. They created a vibrant network of individual artists, literary figures, and organizations — such as the all-white Society for the Preservation of Negro Spirituals — that nurtured architectural preservation, art, literature, and tourism while appropriating African American folk culture. In the process, they translated their selective and idiosyncratic personal, familial, and class memories into a collective identity for the city. The Charleston this group built, Yuhl argues, presented a sanitized yet highly marketable version of the American past. Their efforts invited attention and praise from outsiders while protecting social hierarchies and preserving the political and economic power of whites. Through the example of this colorful southern city, Yuhl posits a larger critique about the use of heritage and demonstrates how something as intangible as the recalled past can be transformed into real political, economic, and social power. |
Contents
| 1 | |
A Golden Haze of Memory and Association The Creation of a Historic Charleston Landscape | 21 |
The Legend Is Truer than the Fact Artistic Representations of Race Time and Place | 53 |
History Touches Legend in Charleston The Literary Packaging of Americas Most Historic City | 89 |
Here Came Remembrance Staging Race and Performing the Past | 127 |
Where Mellow Past and Present Meet Selling History by the Sea | 157 |
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African American Albert Simons Albert Simons Papers Alfred Huger Alice Ravenel Huger antebellum architectural artists blackface Carolina Low Carolina Low-Country Chapel Hill Charleston Evening Post Charleston Museum City of Charleston city’s colonial Columbia concert Courier cultural DuBose Heyward DuBose Heyward Papers elite white Elizabeth O'Neill Verner example ffff Gibbes Gullah Herbert Ravenel Sass Hervey Allen Heyward-Washington House Historic Charleston historical memory Hutson Ibid January John Bennett John Bennett Papers Josephine Pinckney literary Low Country Magazine Manigault House March modern Negro Spirituals newspaper clipping North Carolina Press Poetry Society Porgy Porgy and Bess Preservation of Negro Preservation of Old preservationists PSSC racial Ravenel Huger Smith Renaissance SCHS slave Society of South Society's Songs South Carolina South Carolina Historical Southern Spirituals Society SPOD SPOD Papers sps members SPS Papers Stoney Susan Pringle Frost tourist tradition University of North University Press visitors William Watts William Watts Ball York
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Page 3 - A city of ruins, of desolation, of vacant houses, of widowed women, of rotting wharves, of deserted warehouses, of weed-wild gardens, of miles of grass-grown streets, of acres of pitiful and voiceful barrenness...