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 town's public history—tourist brochures, promotional narratives, historic homes, memorials, and monuments—are devoted to the founding eighteenth-century families and Confederate soldiers in Luray's 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 white, hegemonic heritage of the town. Sustaining Identity, Recapturing Heritage is groundbreaking in its study of African-American tourism.
"This book has an important and laudable thesis. Denkler makes the correct arguments and seems to draw the correct conclusion." - Virginia Magazine Of History - Biography, November 2008
"Denkler argues passionately for writing black history into Luray's displays of public history." - Journal of American History, December 2008
"Succinct, clearly written study....Denkler has provided a highly readable study that raises important challenges....Few works on these topics have so insightfully unpacked views of the past from both sides of the color line. Her work is a monument to the value of interviews in enriching research in published sources and the interpretation of cultural landscapes." - H-Net: Humanities and Social Science Reviews Online, January 2009
