Sustaining Identity Recapturing Heritage: Exploring Issues of Public History Tourism and Race in a Southern Rural Town

Sustaining Identity Recapturing Heritage examines the complex web of public history race cultural identity and tourism in Luray Virginia a rural Southern town. The "texts" associated with this towns public history-tourist brochures promotional narratives historic homes memorials and monuments-are devoted to the founding eighteenth-century families and Confederate soldiers in Lurays past but they also marginalize the history and heritage of African Americans and American Indians and nearly obliterate the history of women in this region. Thus the public history does not reflect the actual history of this town. A close look at one town helps to debunk the ideas and ideologies of the existence of a monolithic "South" since the term could mean Mississippi North Carolina or somewhere-in-between. Luray and the Shenandoah Valley with their distinctive geographical economical architectural and cultural history can boast of its own discrete "southern" identity. The book reveals how African-American texts and history reveal contributions to the town of Luray and the Shenandoah Valley region. The book studies the "Ol Slave Auction Block" a controversial public history site that subverts the…