Designing Dixie: Tourism, Memory, and Urban Space in the New South (The American South Series)

Although many white southerners chose to memorialize the Lost Cause in
the aftermath of the Civil War, boosters, entrepreneurs, and architects in southern cities
believed that economic development, rather than nostalgia, would foster reconciliation between
North and South. In Designing Dixie, Reiko Hillyer shows how these boosters
crafted distinctive local pasts designed to promote their economic futures and to attract
northern tourists and investors.

Neither romanticizing the Old South nor
appealing to Lost Cause ideology, promoters of New South industrialization used urban design to
construct particular relationships to each city’s southern, slaveholding, and Confederate
pasts. Drawing on the approaches of cultural history, landscape studies, and the history of
memory, Hillyer shows how the southern tourist destinations of St. Augustine, Richmond, and
Atlanta deployed historical imagery to attract northern investment. St. Augustine’s
Spanish Renaissance Revival resorts muted the town’s Confederate past and linked northern
investment in the city to the tradition of imperial expansion. Richmond boasted its colonial and
Revolutionary heritage, depicting its industrial development as an outgrowth of national
destiny. Atlanta’s use of northern architectural language displaced the southern identity
of the city and substituted a narrative of long-standing allegiance to a modern industrial
order. With its emphases on alternative southern pasts, architectural design, tourism, and
political economy, Designing Dixie significantly revises our understandings
of both southern historical memory and post–Civil War sectional
reconciliation.