North Carolina Office of Archives and History

Enacting History by Scott Magelssen; Rhona Justice-MalloyReview by: Jessie SwiggerThe North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. 89, No. 2 (APRIL 2012), pp. 232-233Published by: North Carolina Office of Archives and HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23523824 .

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232 Book Reviews

Rockefeller; and Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford are better remembered, nobody has

really written about the Republican Party from 1944 to 1953 as well as Bowen does.

His stories of national committee politics and portraits of other leading figures in the

party at the time—such as Guy Gabrielson, William Knowland, Harold Stassen, and

Arthur Summerfield—are entertaining and illuminating. This is a masterful treatment

of a time when the Republican Party was truly a minority party, and an adroit

explanation of how it began to lift itself out of the doldrums.

North Carolina State University

Andrew J. Taylor

Enacting History. Edited by Scott Magelssen and Rhona Justice-Malloy. (Tuscaloosa: University

of Alabama Press, 2011. Acknowledgments, introduction, illustrations, notes. Pp. ix, 230.

$24.95, paper; $19.96, e-book.)

Academic and public historians have increasingly turned to performance and

reenactment to engage their audiences. Such efforts are not without conflict or

controversy. For example, Colonial Williamsburg's decision to reenact a slave auction

in 1994 was met with protests from the local chapter of the National Association for

the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). After viewing the performance, however, many objectors changed their minds, explaining that the performance was

not only respectful, but also that it personalized a traumatic past. The process by which reenactors construct performances and the ways in which

various publics consume them are the subject of Scott Magelssen and Rhona Justice

Malloy's edited volume, Enacting History. Ten captivating essays contemplate

historical reenactment from a scholarly perspective, exposing the contours of

historical performances in diverse settings such as battle reenactments, living history

museums, reality television, plays, and adventure-tourism sites.

Several essays focus on the complex role that authenticity plays in historical

reenactment. For example, Leigh demons argues that reenactments of the Texas

Revolution are bound by the "rhetoric of authenticity" (p. 17), but that they also serve as spaces where participants and audiences focus on narratives that support their

personal politics. Lindsay Adamson Livingston investigates the Church of Latter Day Saints' purchase and consecration of land in Palmyra, New York, where Joseph Smith had his vision, and in Nauvoo, Illinois, the Mormons' first settlement. At these sites, the authenticity of specific places allows missionaries and tourists to connect to origin stories central to their faith. Richard L. Poole reflects on his struggle to balance

history, popular memory, and performance in his creation and presentation of a play commemorating the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial, an experience that forever

changed him. Now, as spectator or performer of the past, he continually asks whether "it really happened that way, or if it really matters how it happened" (p. 85).

Several essays contemplate how performance can communicate histories long

excluded from the dominant narrative. Patricia Ybarra's discussion of her production

THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL REVIEW

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Book Reviews 233

of and audience response to Marcus Gardley's . . . and Jesus Moonivalks the Mississippi at

Brown University is particularly compelling. Ybarra argues that her choice to add

violent scenes to a play about enslavement and family ties proposes that plays can

serve as dynamic memorials, ones that catalyze difficult emotions and discussions.

Scott Magelssen is both spectator and performer when he participates in the

simulation of an illegal crossing of the U.S.-Mexico border. Over six hours, tourists

run, cower in small spaces, submit to being blindfolded, and face confrontation with

the border patrol. Caminata Nocturna is part of a growing global adventure-tourism

industry, one that Magelssen argues is clearly problematic, but that offers experiences and information inaccessible through the written word.

Enacting History encourages readers to consider not only issues centering on

performance, but also the wide array of settings in which history is produced and

consumed. While performance and theater studies inform the method and approach of each essay, academic and public historians will find a fascinating window into the

world of reenactors and spectators, one that increasingly shapes representations of

the past.

Western Carolina University

Jessie Swigger

Flashes of a Southern Spirit: Meanings of the Spirit in the U.S. South. By Charles Reagan Wilson.

(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011. Preface, acknowledgments, introduction,

illustrations, afterword, notes, index. Pp. xviii, 249. $24-95, paper; $59.95, cloth.)

Flashes of a Southern Spirit is the second collection of previously published essays by Charles Reagan Wilson. Within southern studies, Wilson, the Kelly Gene Cook Sr.

Chair of History at the University of Mississippi, needs no introduction. For thirty

years, he has led the field from the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, editing the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture with Bill Ferris, as well as overseeing several other

volumes central to the effort to understand the South as a peculiar repository of

tradition and innovation. Using source material ranging from post office murals to

literary criticism, and deploying a deep archival knowledge and visual acumen, Wilson

advocates and demonstrates the virtues of cultural history. Flashes of a Southern Spirit is,

at core, attempting to solve the question of southern creativity: what exactly is it, and

from whence did it come?

The assembled twelve essays offer a variety of replies to the preceding questions. Yet

they all focus on the brew of biracial experience, spiritual dexterity, and pastoral commitments within a shifting modernity that produced geniuses ranging from

William Faulkner to Al Green. One essay juxtaposes Depression-era writer James

Agee and the Hillbilly Shakespeare, Hank Williams, in order to explore the

signification of poor whites in the cultural imagination of the South. Another essay

specifies the history of the southern cultural renaissance in an effort to explain that

creative efflorescence through certain aspects of regional modernization. Two other

VOLUME LXXXIX • NUMBER 2 • APRIL 2012

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