Nola Nance Oliver's book 'Natchez, Symbol of the Old South' delves deep into the historical and cultural significance of the city of Natchez, focusing on its role as a symbol of the Old South. Oliver's writing style is both informative and engaging, providing readers with a comprehensive understanding of Natchez's rich heritage and its impact on Southern identity. Through detailed analysis and vivid descriptions, Oliver brings to life the antebellum splendor of Natchez and explores the complex dynamics of race, class, and power that defined the city in the 19th century. The book is a valuable resource for anyone interested in Southern history, architecture, and culture, offering new insights into the legacy of the Old South. Nola Nance Oliver, an expert on Southern history and architecture, brings a unique perspective to her exploration of Natchez. Drawing on her extensive research and expertise, Oliver paints a nuanced portrait of the city and its place in the collective memory of the American South. Her scholarly approach and in-depth analysis make this book a must-read for students, historians, and anyone with an interest in the complexities of Southern heritage. For a comprehensive and enlightening study of Natchez and its symbolic significance in the Old South, Nola Nance Oliver's 'Natchez, Symbol of the Old South' is a highly recommended read.

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Winner of the 2023 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize Winner of the 2023 UMW Center for Historic Preservation Book Prize For over eighty years, tourists have flocked to Natchez, Mississippi, seeking the “Old South,” but what they encounter is invention: a pageant and rewrite of history first concocted during the Great Depression. In Heritage and Hoop Skirts: How Natchez Created the Old South, author Paul Hardin Kapp reveals how the women of the Natchez Garden Club saved their city, created one of the first cultural tourism economies in the United States, changed the Mississippi landscape through historic preservation, and fashioned elements of the Lost Cause into an industry. Beginning with the first Natchez Spring Pilgrimage of Antebellum Homes in 1932, such women as Katherine Grafton Miller, Roane Fleming Byrnes, and Edith Wyatt Moore challenged the notion that smokestack industries were key to Natchez’s prosperity. These women developed a narrative of graceful living and aristocratic gentlepeople centered on grand but decaying mansions. In crafting this pageantry, they created a tourism magnet based on the antebellum architecture of Natchez. Through their determination and political guile, they enlisted New Deal programs, such as the WPA Writers’ Project and the Historic American Buildings Survey, to promote their version of the city. Their work did save numerous historic buildings and employed both white and African American workers during the Depression. Still, the transformation of Natchez into a tourist draw came at a racial cost and further marginalized African American Natchezians. By attending to the history of preservation in Natchez, Kapp draws on a rich archive of images, architectural documents, and popular culture to explore how meaning is assigned to place and how meaning evolves over time. In showing how and why the Natchez buildings of the “Old South” were first preserved, commercialized, and transformed into a brand, this volume makes a much-needed contribution to ongoing debates over the meaning attached to cultural patrimony.

Nearly seventy years after the Civil War, Natchez, Mississippi, sold itself to Depression-era tourists as a place “Where the Old South Still Lives.” Tourists flocked to view the town’s decaying antebellum mansions, hoopskirted hostesses, and a pageant saturated in sentimental Lost Cause imagery. In Remembering Dixie: The Battle to Control Historical Memory in Natchez, Mississippi, 1865–1941, Susan T. Falck analyzes how the highly biased, white historical memories of what had been a wealthy southern hub originated from the experiences and hardships of the Civil War. These collective narratives eventually culminated in a heritage tourism enterprise still in business today. Additionally, the book includes new research on the African American community’s robust efforts to build historical tradition, most notably, the ways in which African Americans in Natchez worked to create a distinctive postemancipation identity that challenged the dominant white structure. Using a wide range of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sources—many of which have never been fully mined before—Falck reveals the ways in which black and white Natchezians of all classes, male and female, embraced, reinterpreted, and contested Lost Cause ideology. These memory-making struggles resulted in emotional, internecine conflicts that shaped the cultural character of the community and impacted the national understanding of the Old South and the Confederacy as popular culture. Natchez remains relevant today as a microcosm for our nation’s modern-day struggles with Lost Cause ideology, Confederate monuments, racism, and white supremacy. Falck reveals how this remarkable story played out in one important southern community over several generations in vivid detail and richly illustrated analysis.

Using oral history and the printed word, Sterling A. Brown set out during the Second World War to capture the response of African Americans, primarily living in the South, to America's involvement in the war and how it affected them. These responses, brought together in extended, non-fiction essays of many different types, illustrate the diversity of opinions in the Black South about the war and the war period in America. For nearly sixty years, the excerpts that were never published languished in Brown's manuscript collection at Howard University. Now, for the first time, all of the completed pieces of unpublished writings are combined with the few published sections into the book that Brown envisioned. The legacy Brown left us is not only a superb portrait of the way in which African Americans of the mid-century talked and lived; he also provided a methodology that oral and written historians will find extremely useful. This is clearly a document from another time, as its now outdated title reminds us, but it reveals a world that still informs our sense of ourselves as a nation. In fact, it is an unforgettable history, which Brown has cast in a bright, elucidating new light.

Originally published in 1947, this book by New Orleans native Harnett Kane provides over 300 pages of detailed history of the Natchez area in Mississippi. It includes vivid descriptions of over 20 antebellum mansions, the personal stories of the families that built them, and the individuals who called them home. History buffs will be interested in reading about the many famous figures named in this book, such as Andrew Jackson and Aaron Burr, who were among those who helped shape the state’s history, and in some cases, the history of the American nation. Also included in Kane’s retelling of interesting and entertaining stories about Natchez are two that garnered national interest in years past: the famous steamboat race between The Natchez and The Robert E. Lee, and the infamous story of Natchez’s "Goat Castle." A fascinating read.