, and a raft of historians of scarcely less talent and repute, W. Stuart Towns's Enduring Legacy inevitably raises the question of whether it was really a necessary project. My answer is an earnest if qualified Yes, and for three reasons: first, it is the only work that adheres rigorously to the author's specific field of expertise in rhetorical analysis-a field in which he has earned a distinguished reputation over a long career; second, it is an unmatched repository of Lost Cause rhetoric that will serve as a convenient reference work in its own right; and finally, the book's extensive and meticulous bibliography and notes furnish direct access to the myriad of numbingly repetitive speeches that constitute Towns's source material. The author takes a strong or maximalist position on the issue of the social effects of oratory in the American south, from the late 1860s down nearly to the present, maintaining that "twentieth-century southerners learned much of how they were going to think about the North, about the Civil War and Reconstruction, and about themselves from the rhetoric of the Lost Cause," and even that the orators he surveys "created the fabric of public memory" (x). Acknowledging that other forms of cultural expression-such as textbooks, novels, and films-also played key roles in shaping cultural perceptions and crystallizing mythical narratives, he nonetheless privileges oratory as the decisive means by which collective self-understanding in the south was shaped. To that end, he dedicates a brief but crucial chapter to southern oratory and its role in civic education both before and after the Civil War, convincingly showing that ceremonial occasions, invariably including several orations, were
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